If you were to control a business how would you organize your way of doing things? For today’s story we will be talking about the rise of an industry. As well as its impacts that were made after the rise of king cotton, and how it impacts the world after it. To begin with, in the 1800’s cotton was in high demand and textiles was rapidly expanding. “[In order] to keep up with the new speed of production, the manufactures needed more and more cotton (South Carolina Journey, pg. 118)”. Many thought that cotton was a logical choice to have a successful cash crop and indigo was displace. In the meantime farms also wanted to grow cotton to export. Short staple cotton can grow anywhere (including off the coast) but it was hard to produce. It needed …show more content…
Later on, in 1793 Eli Whitney he designed a new type of cotton gin. While seeing the worker’s hand movement, he invented a machine that could clean 50 pounds a day instead of 1 pound per day. Then, within a year a huge profit was made south carolina quickly became a leading producer and was later on known as “King” of cotton. The new cotton gin immediate interested small farmers to make a profit. Cotton quickly spread small farmers had obtained wealth and status by investing cotton and slaves. While achieving this it helped unite tensions between lower country and upcountry. “[Both[ regions [later on] bec[ame] more similar than different (South Carolina Journey, pg. 119)”. To be continued, the impact of the rise of “King cotton” on society. Let's start with slavery during the rise of “King Cotton”, the cotton gin and all that came with it only made life miserable for enslave people. Some treated their slaves with cruelty, but not all of them were cruel, some treated their slaves relatively well, though they consider them property and viewed them with paternalism. Which is practiced as a father-like-control over them based on the …show more content…
In the plantations slavery spread into two different systems of the work. First of all, “task system” was a common on rice and sea island cotton plantation. Under this task once the day’s tasks were completed, slaves had the rest of the day to rest, help others, or plant and work small plots of land for themselves. The task system allowed a measure of independence for each slave’s work day. On the other hand, cotton planters in the upcountry used the “gang system,” where slaves worked from dawn to dusk. The gang system was harsher than the task system because slaves were under the constant supervision of an overseer or slave driver. Since labor was the center of a plantation life, the relationship between masters and slaves was also at the center of their life’s. The master controls his power over the slaves, but sometimes there were conditions where the slave could negotiate or resist. This kind of interaction depended on the planter and the sometimes, and it could change often. Some were highly skilled, they were able to get their freedom. If a slave’s skill and talents were recognized, slaves were able to earn his/her own money. Sometimes this occurred with the owner’s approval. Some slaves saved enough money and managed to buy their freedom, and even the freedom of loved ones. In the meantime, in the slave quarters slaves created communities. As said above,
Before the American civil war, the Southerner’s economy had almost entirely been constructed on slave and cash crop agriculture. The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney. The cotton gin was a contraption that transmogrified the fabrication of cotton by significantly making the task of removing seeds from the cotton fiber faster. The invention benefitted the slaves because it saved the slaves
Eli Whitney's machine could produce up to 23 kg (50 lb) of cleaned cotton daily, making southern cotton a profitable crop for the first time. Unfortunately Whitney failed to profit from his invention; imitations of his machine appeared, and his 1794 invention was not upheld until 1807.
1.In 1831, James Henry Hammond inherited through marriage Silver Bluff Plantation, on the shores of South Carolina. He was a Lawyer, Teacher and a Newspaper editor. He undertook the running of his plantation and soon realized it was not an easy job to overcome the dominance of the complexity of social system that existed. He struggled to control and manage it for the next thirty years. He called a “a system of roguery. “Hammond astutely recognized that black life on his plantation was structured and organized as a “system “, the very existence of which seemed necessarily a challenge to his absolute control and therefore, as he perceived it a kind of “roguery.” Because Hammond’s mastery over his bondsmen depended upon his success at undermining slave society and culture, he established a carefully designed plan of physical
The 19th century market revolution was a period of dramatic socioeconomic development in the United States. According to Ronald Takaki, this “revolution” culminated in a boom of entreprenuership, ease of business, and an insatiable demand for labor that led to the racialization of minorities in the United States. After a stagnate economy in the late 1700s due to poor soil quality, the invention of the Cotton Gin by Elie Whitney jumpstarted the market by allowing tougher strains of cotton to be grown and processed. Suddenly, the “Cotton Kingdom” was immensely profitable. In addition, a decrease in shipping costs (76) and spreading use of banking and capital (76) made doing business in the US easier. The United States also had, in contrary to
During the period between 1790 and 1850, the United States was rapidly changing. It was now a separate country with its own economy, laws, and government. The country was learning to live on its own, apart from England. There began to appear a rift between North and South. The North believing in the Puritan Merchant role model, and the South in the role model of the English Country Squire. The North traded with everyone, while the South traded primarily with England. The major crop in the South was tobacco, and because of the decline in the price of tobacco the slave trade was dying, just as those in the North hoped it would. Then came a man, and an invention, which changed the course of history. In 1792, Eli Whitney visited the plantation of Catherine Greene, the wife of Revolutionary War general, Nathaniel Greene, near Savannah Georgia. He watched cotton being cleaned; a very long and time consuming process to do by hand. Watching the cotton being cleaned an idea came to Whitney. He decided he would build a machine that would clean cotton faster than it could be done by hand. Thus, he created the cotton gin.
The south, which was mostly agricultural, depended on the production of cotton. It was very important to their economy. Before Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin was used throughout the south, the United States produced about 750,000 bales of hay in 1830 (How the Cotton Gin). By 1850 it had increased to 2.85 billion bales of hay (How the Cotton Gin). Most of this was in the south because it had the weather conditions needed for cotton to grow. In 1793 Whitney saw the difficulty of taking out cotton seeds by hand (Cefrey 10-11). He decided to create a machine that could clean cotton faster than a human could. The Cotton Gin made the processing of cotton much faster and quicker. As a result of this, land owners were now able to have large cotton plantations across the south (How the Cotton Gin). Southerners were becoming wealthy very fast because of the cotton gin. Eli Whitney’s invention of the Cotton Gin made cotton the South’s main crop making more slave labor needed and political tensions rise.
The reason why slavery spread into the cotton kingdom after revolution is because the tobacco income plummeted as white setters from Virginia and Carolinas forcing the original Native Americans inhabitants farther and farther west where they established plantations. The wide spread use of the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, made these cotton plantations more efficient and profitable. Around 1820, slavery was concentrated in tobacco growing areas of Virginia, Kentucky along coastal region of South Carolina and Northern Georgia and in 1860s it spread deep in the South (Alabama, Texas, Louisiana) following the spread of cotton.
The author goes on to describe antebellum slavery. During this time he describes slavery as a massive expansion. He expresses this knowledge through numbers of slaves and overwhelming facts. At this time cotton boosted the economy of all the slave states, cotton producing or not. Cotton created an intense demand for slave labor and therefore slave prices rose to an all time high. Slave trading was very traumatic for the slaves, being separated from the only thing they knew. Some lived on plantations under a watchful eye and others worked right beside their owners. Slaves on large plantations usually worked in gangs, and there were better positions to work then others. Some gangs were separated into groups of lighter work, consisting of men and woman. Other gangs weren't so lucky and were assigned to hard labor.
In the south it was illegal for slaves to receive an education, to many, to vote, to own property, to testify in court were even to burn their freedom through their work and the have 15 minutes break a day and to eat, slaves were given megger rations mostly of corn meal pork and the last season’s, and every year slaves received one new said winter and summer clothes and a new blanket, most slaves share their small cabins with 10 to 12 people and slept on straw piled on a dirt floor. The lives of slaves who work on tobacco plantations were filled with ending hardship suffering and poverty. Slave woke up at dawn and spend all day working on rice plantations. One of 100s out of 1000s f African-Americans that were enslaved and forced to spend their lives. Because of the racism and segregation, they faced, slaves soon develop a unique culture found nowhere else in the world. Slaves often sang spirituals to express political or religious beliefs, these songs could also contain directions for runaway’s slave. Slaves owner permitted the singing because they believed it helped slaves work faster. Slaves didn’t get to choose
The North and South were forming completely different economies, and therefore completely different geographies, from one another during the period of the Industrial Revolution and right before the Civil War. The North’s economy was based mainly upon industrialization from the formation of the American System, which was producing large quantities of goods in factories. The North was becoming much more urbanized due to factories being located in cities, near the major railroad systems for transportation of the goods, along with the movement of large groups of factory workers to the cities to be closer to their jobs. With the North’s increased rate of job opportunities, many different people of different ethnic groups and classes ended up working together. This ignited the demise of the North’s social order. The South was not as rapidly urbanizing as the North, and therefore social order was still in existence; the South’s economy was based upon the production of cotton after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin. Large cotton plantations’ production made up the bulk of America’s...
R - King Cotton is relevant to U.S. history because it explains why the South became the Confederacy and why they were so against the freeing of the slaves
Cotton was a very expensive industry. Picking cotton seeds from the cotton itself was extremely difficult and required a lot of manual labor. Obviously with labor, you need to pay your workers. This was part of the reason that tobacco and rice were two more important cash crops in colonial times, they were both cheaper and easier. However, in 1794 that all changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This invention sped up the process tremendously. This was the key factor to the turning point in the cotton revolution.
Before the advent of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, plantations in the Antebellum South experimented with several crops in attempt to gain wealth, but nothing seemed to work. The climate was too hot for tobacco, yet not hot enough for sugar cane (Huff 36). Both long-staple and short- staple cotton were experimented, but were found unable to be prof...
Do you know when and how the growth of cotton was produced and what made it faster and more profitable for people to buy this product. Well i do this cotton was grown and picked by african slaves in the South. The word Antebellum means “before war”, but in this time conflict and tension still remained in the south. This included the rise of cotton and mills, the impact of cotton on society, and the impact of cotton on the slaves.
In the South, cotton became a profitable cash crop and by the mid-19th century had become America’s leading export (History.com Staff, 2010). Cotton was an ideal crop in many ways, however cotton plants contained seeds that were difficult and labor intensive to separate. In 1794, Eli Whitney invented a machine that would greatly speed up the process of removing the seeds from cotton fibers. The cotton “gin” effectively and efficiently removed the seeds from cotton plants, enabling operators to produce fifty times more cotton that workers could by hand (Tindall, 20121109). Agricultural developments alongside interconnected railroad infrastructure increased productivity and volume, however, technology changed the economic direction in even more profound ways engendering the factory system.