The King Cotton Forever Changed The Southern Economy And Society

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The "King Cotton" forever changed the Southern Economy and Society with production change, the movement of slavery, and slavery itself. Eli Whitney invented the machine known as the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin uses a spiked cylinder to remove seeds from cotton fibers. Before this introduction, people used to remove seeds by hand, which was very time-consuming compared to the Cotton Gin. With the Cotton Gin, cotton was much more profitable. Therefore, to grow more cotton, there had to be more labor. So planters used slave labor to produce more cotton. As a result, cotton production grew along with the growth of slavery. Cotton then became the dominant source of wealth for the country. Cotton enriched southern farmers as well as Northern bankers,

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