Introduction of the Cotton Gin

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Introduction of the Cotton Gin.m4a

Vocabulary

Cotton gin: A machine for separating cotton fluff from seeds.

Green seed cotton/Short-staple cotton: The most common type of cotton grown in the southern United States. It is characterized by short fibers that stick to the seeds, making them more difficult to separate from its seed.

The Cotton Gin

The picture below is Eli Whitney’s cotton gin patent drawing dated March 14, 1794. Though he did not invent the cotton gin, which had existed in many forms for centuries, Whitney popularized the use of a cotton gin that more efficiently cleaned short-staple cotton by removing the seeds from the fluff. This enabled plantation owners to grow and process large amounts of cotton for textile factories, which yielded big profits for plantation owners and mill owners, and encouraged enslavers to increase the number of people they enslaved to cultivate the crop.

Secondary Source

“Green seed cotton was … more difficult to separate from its seed…. Whitney’s gin ‘so facilitates the preparation of this species, for use, that the cultivation of it has suddenly become an object of infinitely greater importance.' … 'The whole interior of the Southern states were [languishing] … for want of some objects to engage their attention, and employ their industry, when the invention of this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country in active motion.’ ... Supplying our sister states with ‘raw materials for their manufactories.'”

Image: “Eli Whitney’s Patent for the Cotton Gin,” The National Archives and Records Administration, Group 233, Identifier 306631. Text: Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 70-71.

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