The Dark Side of the Boom
A Machine, and a Turning Point
Eli Whitney, a recent Yale graduate working as a tutor on a Georgia plantation, built the cotton gin in 1793 to mechanically separate seeds from short-staple cotton fiber. By hand, one person could clean roughly one pound of cotton fiber a day. Two people using Whitney's gin could produce about 50 pounds in the same time.
Efficiency That Expanded Bondage
The gin didn't reduce the need for labor — it made cotton so profitable that demand for enslaved workers to plant and pick it grew sharply. The enslaved population of the American South rose to roughly 4 million people by the eve of the Civil War, and by 1860 the United States supplied close to three-quarters of the world's raw cotton.
Land, Removal, and Expansion
Rising cotton profits also drove plantations westward, including the forced displacement of Native nations under policies like the Indian Removal Act of 1830, as planters sought new land across the Deep South to grow more of the crop feeding Manchester's mills.
