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Did The Cotton Gin Cause The Civil War

347 Words2 Pages
The Cotton Gin, never was there an artifact that brought so much prosperity as well as hardship in equal measure. Eli Whitney’s invention which was created in 1793 is often cited by historians as an indirect cause of the American Civil War. The genius of the cotton gin was that it could separate the seed from the cotton, so rather than having armies of slaves picking cotton from sun up to sun down this machine could do the job in half the time. Consider this, now even a small plantation operation could quadruple its bottom line, this caused an even greater boom in the acquisition of slaves. Francis Ellen Watkins stated, “A hundred thousand new-born babes are annually added to the victims of slavery; twenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed
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