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A model of a 19th-century cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Connecticut. A Cotton Gin—meaning "Cotton engine" [1] [2] —is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. [3]
While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did give him fame. It has been argued by some historians that Whitney's cotton gin was an important if unintended cause of the American Civil War. After Whitney's invention, the plantation slavery industry was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War. [10]
Antebellum South Carolina is typically defined by historians as South Carolina during the period between the War of 1812, which ended in 1815, and the American Civil War, which began in 1861. After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, the economies of the Upcountry and the Lowcountry of the state became fairly equal in wealth.
William Ellison Jr. (April 1790 – December 5, 1861), born April Ellison, was an American cotton gin maker and blacksmith in South Carolina, and former African-American slave who achieved considerable success as a slaveowner before the American Civil War. He eventually became a major planter and one of the wealthiest property owners in the ...
The cotton gin greatly increased the efficiency with which cotton could be harvested, contributing to the consolidation of "King Cotton" as the backbone of the economy of the Deep South, and to the entrenchment of the system of slave labor on which the cotton plantation economy depended. Any chance that the South would industrialize was over.
Griswold's village, Griswoldville, was an industrial site/company town with a cotton gin plant, soap and tallow factory, candle factory, saw and grist mill, post office and non-denominational church. At the outbreak of the American Civil War , the Griswold cotton gin factory was leased to the Confederate government and retooled to make pistols ...
Before the Civil War, John Jarrell's farm was one of the half-million cotton farms in the South [4] that collectively produced two-thirds of the world's cotton. [5] Like many small planters, John Jarrell benefited from the development of the cotton gin in 1793 by Eli Whitney, which made it practical to cultivate heavily seeded, short-staple cotton even in hilly, inland areas of Georgia.
These seeds are either used again to grow more cotton or, if badly damaged, disposed of. The cotton gin uses a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through the screen, while brushes continuously remove the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and later received a patent ...