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Cotton Gin Patent. It shows sawtooth gin blades, which were not part of Whitney's original patent. A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum. The cotton gin is a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had previously been extremely labor-intensive. The word gin is short for engine.
The invention of the cotton gin led to increased demands for slave labor in the American South, reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century. [38] The cotton gin thus "transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural powerhouse". [39]
"The First Cotton Gin" conjectural image from 1869. Cotton was at first a small-scale crop in the South. Cotton farming boomed following the improvement of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. [59] It was 50 times more productive at removing the seeds than with a roller. Soon, large cotton plantations, based on slave labor, expanded in the richest ...
The cotton gin made it possible to increase cotton production. Cotton became the main export crop, but after a few years, the fertility of the soil was depleted and the plantation was moved to the new land further west. Much land was cleared and put into growing cotton in the Mississippi valley and in Alabama, and new grain growing areas were ...
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As cotton-producing estates grew in size, so did the number of slaveholders and the average number of enslaved people held. [42] [41] A cotton plantation normally had a cotton gin house, where the cotton gin was used to remove the seeds from raw cotton. After ginning, the cotton had to be baled before it could be warehoused and
The era of King Cotton was underway by the early 1800s to such an extent that by the mid-19th century, southern slave plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton. The introduction of the cotton gin was as unexpected as it was unprecedented. British textiles had expanded with no change in ginning principles in centuries.
In the 15 years between the invention of the cotton gin and the passage of the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, the slave trade increased and slavery became more prevalent in the southern United States. [7]