Why The Cotton Gin Is Not Just A Revolution

“The cotton gin is not just a machine; it's a revolution in the way we live and work.” The Cotton Gin as we know it today had a great impact on how we produced cotton. The creator of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney, was born on December 8, 1765, in Eastborough, Massachusetts. As he moved towards the South, he discovered the difficulty of taking out the seeds from the cotton and decided to create a machine that eventually removed the seeds from all the cotton plants. He patented the cotton gin on March 14, 1794. The smaller cotton gins could be operated by hand, while the bigger ones could be powered by a horse and later by a steam engine. The Cotton Gin impacted the lives of the working class by increasing the demand for labor and land, reducing …show more content…

Southern slave owners benefited from this because they were wealthy. Another reason is that “Americans were driving into the frontier to the north in search of farmland for cotton and opportunity.” This explains how the success of cotton production led to looking for more land to start more plantations. They went westward during the westward expansion and bought land to build these plantations or they would kick out Native American tribes as well so that they could build more plantations. By the reduction of the amount of labor of removing seeds, the slaves were still doing hard labor. “While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for enslaved labor to grow and pick the cotton.” This explains how the cotton gin helped the reduction of labor of removing seeds but did not reduce the amount of labor that was being used in these plantations, they still had to work long hours and endure discipline from their owners every day. It was not easy for them that they had to come up with different ways to stop that, whether it was poisoning little by little their master, breaking tools, or telling each