America's Slave and Cotton Industries Before the Cotton Gin
Before the cotton gin, cotton wasn’t seen as a very profitable resource due to the difficulty of refining it. The only type of cotton that was grown for profit was the long-staple type of the crop that was only grown off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on the Sea Islands. The only type of cotton that could be grown inland was the “green seed”, short-staple type of cotton that took hours to remove the seeds from the fibers (Schur). Cotton’s seeds had to be removed by hand in a long, painful process before the Cotton Gin, therefore it was difficult to refine it in great numbers. In 1790, only 3,135 bales of cotton were produced (U.S. 18).
A drawing depicting a tobacco plantation
In the South, cash crops were the states’ main source of income, and they included tobacco, indigo, and rice (Kelley). To harvest these crops, slave labor was a great asset to Southern plantation owners, but the profitability of slavery was slowly declining in the years before the cotton gin since the cost of maintaining slaves was higher than what the plantation owners could afford. Leaders had been planning to eventually abolish slavery as it slowly got less and less profitable, which it seemed to be doing (PBS). Little did they know, Eli Whitney was in the process of creating an invention that would increase the profitability of slavery exponentially. Also at the time, an extreme surplus of tobacco, combined with exhaustion of the soil, led plantation owners to seek a new crop to grow (Schur).