Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: October 28, 1793. Eli Whitney submitted a patent for his invention known as the cotton gin. Perhaps more than any technology in American history, this invention profoundly revolutionized American labor, all in terrible ways Let's talk about it!

Creating the modern cotton industry meant the transition from agricultural to industrial labor in the North with the rise of the factory system and the rapid expansion and intensification of slavery in the South to produce the cotton.

The cotton gin went far to create the 19th century American economy and sharpened the divides between work and labor between regions of the United States, problems that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

People had long known of the versatile uses of cotton. It was grown and weaved around the world at the appropriate latitudes and climates. There were many cotton cultures up to this time.

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.

The problem was the seed inside the cotton boll, to which the plant’s fibers stuck. Thus, the labor it took to process it made it a luxury good. The cotton gin solved that problem by mechanically separating the fibers from the seeds.

This made cotton a universal product and the production of it an international business that would radically change the entire United States and transform work.

The story behind this is interesting. Rhode Island Revolutionary War leader Nathanael Greene moved to Georgia when the state gave him a plantation. Of course he embraced slaveholding. But he overheated and dropped dead of heat stroke.

Whitney became the guy Greene's widow hired to teach their kids. Whether he really "invented" the cotton gin or not is debatable. But he did submit that patent.

He hoped to make a lot of money on it but American patent law was weak at the time and others copied him. Quickly the invention spread around the South.

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.

The southern discussion of slavery transformed from a “necessary evil” to a “positive good.” 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.

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.

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 percent of those slaves were involved in cotton production.

Then of course there was the impact on industrial labor in the North. But we will leave that for another day.