Invention of the Cotton
Gin Accelerates the
Expansion of Slavery:
1794
Illustration of enslaved people gathering cotton on a southern plantation.
Before the patenting of the cotton gin in 1794, it was impossible for enslaved workers to clean as much cotton as they could grow, with the average person able to remove seeds from only around one pound of cotton a day.
A hand-cranked gin, in contrast, could clean 50 pounds in the same amount of time. [#11] Recognizing the potential for exponentially increasing profits, enslavers aggressively acquired more land and more enslaved labor, helping drive the number of slave states from six in 1790 to 15 in 1860.
At that point, roughly one in three southerners was enslaved. Their unpaid labor produced three-quarters of the world’s cotton supply, which was primarily shipped to England and New England to be made into cloth. [#12]
With enslaved people consigned to increasingly larger plantations, enslavers sought to further increase productivity through torturing workers to meet ever-higher quotas. Enslavers’ sense of an endless supply of land and labor reduced competition, which made them willing to document and share the most effective torture methods with each other. [#13]
These strategies were so effective that “within 10 years after the cotton gin was put into use, the value of the total United States crop leaped from $150,000 to more than $8 million.” [#14]
As the nation headed into the Civil War, “cotton that was grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export.” [#15] The enslaved workers themselves made up 48% of the South’s total wealth in 1860. [#16] Given their ownership of other humans and their lifetime of labor, it is perhaps unsurprising that there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country by the war’s start. [#17]
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?
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Dispossession of Land
from Indigenous Peoples:
1607 – Present Day
Wall Street Established
as an Official Trading
Post of Enslaved Peoples:
1711
Invention of the Cotton
Gin Accelerates the
Expansion of Slavery:
1794
Choctaw Nation Forced
to Abandon Ancestral
Lands for “Indian
Territory”: 1831
Lehman Brothers’
Cotton Exchange: 1858
Sharecropping and Debt
Peonage: 1870s-1940s
Prison Labor:
1870s - Present Day
Railroads and Chinese
Laborers: 1880s-1890s
Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre: 1921
Stock Market Crashes, Ushering in the Great Depression: 1929
LA Police "Repatriate" Mexican Americans and Immigrants at La Placita Park: 1931
The Home Owners Loan Corporation Develops Redlining: 1933
Report on “Pinklining” Reveals How Wall Street Targets Women for Toxic Loans: 2016
