The Cotton Gin and Its Legacies

After Eli Whitney completed his degree at Yale in 1792, he travelled towards South Carolina with the intention of becoming a tutor to wealthy children to earn money for law school. A fellow traveller, Catherine Littlefield Greene, invited him to instead visit her plantation north of Savannah, Georgia. The plantation was primarily focused on rice, the primary crop of coastal Georgia and South Carolina at the time, but they also grew cotton.

One of the greatest challenges of cotton agriculture was removing the plant’s large, sticky seeds from among the valuable fibers. This work was done by hand by enslaved laborers, and it was both physically demanding and very slow. It could take one worker many hours to produce one pound of cleaned fiber.

Whitney’s solution to this problem was a machine with two cylinders that combed the cotton and pulled it through small holes, leaving the seeds behind. It has been suggested that Catherine Greene also contributed ideas to the design. The finished machine led to a vast improvement in efficiency: one small gin could produce 50 lbs of cotton in a day, the equivalent of several hundred hours of hand labor.

CAPTION: Patent drawing for Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, 1794. Patent #72-X, The National Archives.

The increased efficiency of the cotton gin meant cotton could be produced on a much larger scale. Cotton is measured in bales, a standardized cube of 500 pounds of fiber. In 1790, the United States produced less than 9,000 bales of cotton annually, or about 45,000 pounds; by 1800, the country was producing more than 200,000 bales, or over 1 million pounds. By 1860, production had reached over 4 million bales annually, or 2 billion pounds. Cotton was by far the country’s largest agricultural export, and by 1830, finished cotton goods were also the country’s largest industrial export.

Because the gin made cotton processing much more efficient, it also made cotton growing much more profitable. Cotton agriculture boomed, and every new acre of cotton grown required more enslaved labor to maintain it. The birth of the cotton gin therefore exponentially increased the demand for slavery in America and the suffering caused by that system.

The gin made the removal of seeds easier, but the tasks of planting, growing, and harvesting the cotton were still horrifically arduous. The enslaved workers picked around 200 pounds a day of cotton under the summer sun, and faced violence if they did not meet expected quotas. Enslaved workers also ran the gins and presses that processed the cotton, and it was not safe or easy: the labor was hard, the machines had many hazardous moving parts, and the small cotton fibers expelled into the air caused lung damage.

CAPTION: Working inside a cotton gin building in Dahomey, Mississippi, 1899. The gins are in the background on right. The men on the left are operating a cotton press to make a bale. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-53149.

In 1790, three years before Whitney invented the cotton gin, around 700,000 people were enslaved in the United States, primarily on southern tobacco and rice plantations. Cotton was also grown, but the difficulty of processing it meant it was a relatively minor crop. By 1860, around 4 million people were enslaved in the American states and territories - an increase of more than 550%. Cotton was the primary plantation crop. Around 2.5 million people were enslaved in the cotton-growing regions of the Atlantic coastal plain and the deep south, from eastern Maryland to Texas. Every one of these individuals had their own story, and every one was impacted by the forced labor, violence, familial separations, and personal and cultural resistance inherent in enslavement - a system supported by the cotton gin’s success.

In the 1830s, the hunger for new land for cotton agriculture was a major factor in the forced displacement of Native American people from the southeastern United States. The American government expelled the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole tribes from their lands and forced them to walk to the new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi (now Oklahoma), an event known as the Trails of Tears. It is estimated that at least 60,000 people made the journey, with more than 8,000 people dying on the way. These peoples’ ancestral land, much of it in the heart of the southern cotton belt, were turned over to white landowners.

The marches of the 1830s were part of a long history of violence, forced removals, and other genocidal actions against Native Americans. By the 1850s, Whitney guns became a favored weapon of the rangers and civilians as white settlers continued to use violence to claim more and more western land from Native American tribes.

CAPTION: Map showing Native American lands at the time of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (dark green) and the Indian Territory in future Oklahoma (yellow-green), with the routes of the Trails of Tears. Wikimedia Commons.

CAPTION: Map showing the areas of greatest cotton production in the United States, c. 1850. New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, b11664211.

This boom in cotton growing created by the cotton gin could not have come at a better time. Between the 1730s and 1770s, British inventors had mechanized every step of textile manufacturing, from spinning the thread to weaving the fabric. These included John Kay's flying shuttle (1733), James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (around 1764), Richard Arkwright's spinning frame and water frame (1769), and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule (1779). At the same time, other inventors and engineers were improving water power and developing steam power, and applying those innovations to the textile machines. 

These innovations meant that the spinning and weaving industry could move from home spinning wheels and looms to vast mechanized mills. The first mills were established in Lancashire, a region with abundant access to water power and proximity to ports where cotton could be imported. By the late 1780s, there were over 200 cotton mills in the United Kingdom. By 1860, there were over 2,500 mills in Lancashire alone. Industrialists in New England took note of the British innovations, and the first American cotton mills opened in Rhode Island in the 1780s. By 1860, there were nearly 300 cotton mills in Rhode Island, with many more in the other northern states, especially Massachusetts.

CAPTION: Spinning thread and weaving cloth in an English cotton mill, 1830s. From Edward Baines, History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain. Wellcome Collection, EPB/B/11968.

The rapid growth of the British cotton industry meant that they needed to import more and more cotton, which does not grow in the United Kingdom. Similarly, the cotton mills of the American north needed cotton from elsewhere. After the invention of the cotton gin, the American south was ready to answer this demand. Cotton agriculture and the cotton industry boomed alongside each other, with supply increasing and increasing to meet demand.

The dual boom of cotton agriculture and the cotton industry had many further effects. Cotton was one of the first large-scale mechanized industries. The need for labor resulted in the rapid expansion of industrial towns and cities, with vast numbers of people leaving rural areas for work in the mills. Concerns over working conditions in mills resulted in some of the first labor movements and the growth of child labor regulations. And the industry’s need for power led to the growth of coal mining and resultant fossil fuel pollution. In many ways, the cotton boom was a major step towards our modern industrialized world, and it was made possible only by the increased production of cotton after the invention of the cotton gin.