This Day in Labor History: October 28, 1793. Eli Whitney submits his patent for the cotton gin. Let's talk about the most important technological advancement in the history of American labor and very much not for the better for most workers. 
People had long known of the versatile uses of cotton This plant produced fibers that could be used for many things, but most usefully clothing, which in the 18th century was often scratchy and uncomfortable for everyday people who could not afford finer fabrics, including cotton
Cotton was grown and produced in many parts of the world, including India and Mexico, for a very long time, usually in home production spinning by women. But Europeans wanted to centralize this under their control. This was the basis of the Industrial Revolution.
The American version of cotton had very sticky seeds. This made it a labor intensive crop to produce. Eli Whitney changed this.
Now, there's a very American story behind all of this. Whitney was in Georgia to begin with because he had met a widow on a boat who then hired him to teach her children. This was the widow of the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, from Rhode Island.
Greene was a Quaker and should have been anti-slavery. But he was also a white man. So after the Revolution, when Georgia offered him a plantation for his service, he said yes and became a slaveholder. But then he dropped dead of heat stroke in that scorching Georgia sun.
And thus, Whitney ends up in Georgia. A tinkerer, he saw the problems of cotton production and figured out how to take care of the problem. This was the cotton gin, a machine to comb out the fiber from the seeds. The American Industrial Revolution now had its raw material.
He didn't really make any money off the patent. Patent law was weak. It was copied everywhere.
The cotton gin immediately transformed the South. By 1815, cotton became the nation’s leading export, tying the Southern elite to the factory owners and investors of Great Britain. By 1840, it was worth more than all other American exports combined.
The system of chattel slavery that had under-girded the colonial tobacco economy had become heavily strained during the 18th century.
Declining soil fertility and the expansion of tobacco production around the British empire meant that the plantation owners were not making the money off of slavery that they did 100 years earlier.
The lack of an economic imperative for the institution went far toward the abolition of slavery in the North after the American Revolution. In the South, it combined with Enlightenment ideals to at least make plantation owners question the institution.
Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry both admitted the institution was bad but could not imagine freeing their slaves because of the lives of luxury the system provided them.
Others were slightly less selfish and either freed their slaves in the 1780s or freed them upon the master’s death, such as George Washington.
The general assumption though was that slavery was going to disappear, even if Georgia and South Carolina wouldn’t like it much. As Oliver Ellsworth said at the Constitutional Convention, “Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”
The cotton gin ended this equivocation on slavery among the plantation elite and destroyed the myth of disappearing slavery in the North.
Combined with the conquest of rich land in the hot climates of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana over the next few decades, the planters found new ways to make money using slaves.
Thus we would enter the “classic” period of American chattel slavery, replete with the large plantation agriculture you probably think of when envisioning slavery.
The lives for slaves were terrible under this system, with rape, beatings, whippings, murder, and the breaking up of families normal parts of life. This was the labor system of half the United States. And remember, that's what slavery is--a form of labor.
Further advances in cotton farming created breeds that incentivized working slaves as close to death as possible while keeping them just alive to pick more. Driving slaves to death became a reasonable economic proposition for wealthy planters.
As the nation moved toward the Civil War, the southern labor system wrought by the cotton gin was becoming only more entrenched and more brutal for the laborers.
Slaves would resist this in any number of ways–breaking tools, running away from masters, even revolt, such as Nat Turner’s revolt or Denmark Vesey’s supposed conspiracy.
But by and large the system of racialized violence that kept the labor force in place doomed slaves to miserable lives. In 1787, there were 700,000 slaves in the United States. In 1860, there were 4 million and rising. Around 70% of those slaves were involved in cotton production
In the North, the revolution caused by the cotton gin was just as profound. Samuel Slater had opened the United States’ first modern factory, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a couple of years earlier.
The textile industry would explode in the next several decades with all the newly available cotton.
By the 1820s, New England had already undergone a massive economic shift toward textile mills that moved this region from rural to urban, with courts and politicians serving the interests of the industrialists over workers, farmers, and fishers.
At first, this transformation was along the region’s copious waterways–at Pawtucket, Lowell, and Manchester. But further technological advances would for steam power meant owners could build factories anywhere and they dotted the region after the Civil War.
The impact upon northern workers was truly revolutionary. The agricultural economy certainly did not disappear but it soon became secondary to the textile factories in much of the region.
The wealth spawned by textiles created other industries and new transportation technologies like the steamship, canal, and railroad, and by 1860, the growing northern industrial might had reshaped the nation.
It took workers out of the farms and small shops that defined 18th century work and into increasingly large factories. It forced them to labor in incredibly hot and dirty conditions at low wages for 12-14 hours a day. This was not a good life either.
Eventually, the Industrial Revolution that the cotton gin brought to the U.S. meant that workers would lose control over their own labor, the ability to set their own hours of work, the possibility of drinking on the job, and the artisanship of American craft labor.
Replacing it would be the factory floor, the time clock, and the foreman. This is largely in the relatively distant future from 1793, but the transformations began soon after.
It also brought women into the economy in new ways. Supposedly because of their nimble fingers but really because employers could pay them less, women became desirable workers in the cotton factories.
This upended gender roles and when American women resisted the treatment they faced in the factories, spurred the migration of immigrants from Ireland and then eastern and southern Europe to fill these low-paid jobs.
The creation of textile work as women’s work and thus highly exploitative never ended and continues today in the sweatshops of Bangladesh, Honduras, and many other nations. The fight to tame the conditions of industrial labor wrought, in part, by the cotton gin, remains today.
In fact, the conditions of labor in this industry are almost the exact same today as they were in 1850, just in countries you don't really care about. So nothing gets done to help the workers of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. But hey, fast fashion rocks!
This is also a good time to mention the amazing historical work of recent years on the centrality of slavery to capitalism by scholars such as Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, @Ed_Baptist, and @sethrockman, among others. You should buy their books. They will change you.
The fact that we as Americans so often separate our discussion of slavery with what it actually was--an exploitative labor system, says much about why we refuse to confront black poverty and unemployment today.
It's so much easier to talk about how Harriet Tubman is a hero than to go into the implications of a nation based on the enslavement of black labor for its economic development.
This is why chapter 2 of my new books integrates the findings of these other historians to center slavery and the slave general strike during the Civil War as the most important labor action in all of American history.
amazon.com/History-Americ…
amazon.com/History-Americ…
Back tomorrow with another discussion of America's racist capitalism--the lynching of a Japanese-American organizer in Hawaii in the 1880s.
