Essay On Cotton Slavery

100 years after Columbus first arrived in the Americas, the first of 13 colonies, Virginia, was settled. Little did they know that 400 years later, these colonies would evolve and become one of the most powerful nations on Earth. With the colonists populating both southern and northern area, many aspects of the colonies changed. Not only did the colonies change because of the climate and topography (which was inevitable) but also because of the people who lived there. New England was primarily composed of people searching for religious freedom, the Southern Colonies had wealthy people looking for land to grow their plantations, and the middle colonies, the most ethnically diverse, consisting of people searching for a new and wealthier life.

On April 12, 1861, a brutal war broke out between the north and the south called the Civil War. Some say the north, or Union, went to war to abolish slavery, but the south, or Confederates, went to war for states’ rights. Abraham Lincoln, who was president at the time, called the nation “a house divided” because the north and south did not agree. Four long years later, the Union won the victory on May 9, 1865.

The population of the English colonies on American soil slowly but steadily grew: in 1625 it was 2 thousand. People, in 1650 rose to 50 thousand., And by 1700 was already a quarter of a million. Virginia and Massachusetts were the largest English settlement, at the beginning of the XVIII century they lived almost half of the colonists. Another third of the total population accounted for Maryland, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. In New England, people preferred to settle in cities with dense buildings; in the south dominated by sparsely scattered County; Mid colony combine both types of settlements.

Throughout the development of the colonies in America, slave trade grew to be a significant source of labor in primarily southern plantations within the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. During the era, with slaves being condemned to be considered socially inferior by law, and the increase in demand of goods such as rice and indigo, the slave labor force became a notable source for southern plantations in the eighteenth century.

Between the 1820s and 1860s, a time period that was greatly influenced by the Industrial Revolution, people were willing to work hard so that they could provide for their families. Slaves were still being used to help develop the United States of America by harvest crops such as cotton, and please their “masters.” were forced to work and help develop the country. Both slavery and industry helped the country grow financially. Slaves had to work harder to meet higher cotton demands. The introduction of the cotton gin also aided in the aided in the rapid production of cotton (PIIP 9). With the more abundant amounts of cotton being harvested, this helped the industry by creating jobs for cotton mill workers. Tariffs were levied in order to increase the costs of imported goods. This was done to help stimulate the economy. Industry caused the northern states to be prosperous. Meanwhile, slavery gave the south an opportunity to flourish

“Necessity is the mother of all invention.” Cotton labor conducted by slaves was arduous and took long periods of time. A necessity for a faster way to separate the cotton seeds from the fiber evolved because it would take slaves laborious hours to created small amounts of cotton. In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and patented it a year later which mechanized the cotton process. This had the benefit of lowering the price of cotton production and removing slaves from that part of the process. It also had the advantage of amplifying the demand for the white valuable crop. During the antebellum period, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin increased the desire for slavery because of its leading technology, the world’s accelerating demand for cotton,

By the early 1800’s, the vastly growing cotton industry soared as cotton became the nation’s most important and valuable export. The development of the cotton gin only further propelled the cotton industry into economic success. The cotton gin took care of the hard tedious work that slaves used to have to undertake and increased the pace and the quantities in which cotton bales were produced. Working among the cotton fields, slaves adopted the gang system. The gang system was most commonly used in the cotton industry; to speed up production but also formally used among tobacco and sugar production. Under the gang system, slaves suffered long days of intense labor working from sunrise till sunset. The gang system was the most harsh of the two

The North and South were both different and similar in how they operated. They were mostly based on the categories of transportation, agriculture, geography/climate, labor/industry, and society during the early 1800’s. These categories decided how much the North and South would progress as the country continued to grow.

With the start of the Industrial Revolution taking shape in America, a plethora of inventors began to contribute, whether they knew how impactful it would be or not. Massachusetts born Eli Whitney was one such inventor. Eli Whitney was a young student who, after graduated from Yale College in 1793, took a ship to Savannah, Georgia in which he was to take up a tutoring position on a South Carolina plantation. He was to become a private tutor while he concurrently prepared to enter law. While on his journey to Georgia Eli met the widow of General Nathanel Greene, Katherine Greene, in which she invited Eli to visit Mulberry Grove, where she believed that he could be of use in aiding local planters with farming issues. These planters had been

“The South grew, but it did not develop,” is the way one historian described the South during the beginning of the nineteenth century because it failed to move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. This was primarily due to the fact that the South’s agricultural economy was skyrocketing, which caused little incentive for ambitious capitalists to look elsewhere for profit. Slavery played a major role in the prosperity of the South’s economy, as well as impacting it politically and socially. However, despite the common assumption that the majority of whites in the South were slave owners, in actuality only a small minority of southern whites did in fact own slaves. With a population of just above 8 million, the number of slaveholders was only 383,637. No more than one-quarter of the white population partook in slavery itself, this including all the members of slave owning families and all those living in slave owning families. Given that, however, virtually every

The process of black slavery taking route in colonial Virginia was slow. Black slavery mostly became dominant in the 1680s. Slaves became the main labor system on plantations. The amount of white indentured servants declined so the demand for black slaves became necessary in the mid-1660s. The number of white indentured servants that Virginia had up until the mid 1660s, was enough to meet white peoples labor needs. Slavery was also increasing because you never had to pay the slaves that you owned and the plantations required a lot of labor, so slaves were a lot cheaper than the indentured servants. The profits from tobacco and rice led planters to import enslaved Africans, which made the economy depend on slavery. Although slavery was a morally

The cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in 1793. Versions of a cotton gin have existed since the first century in which single rollers were used to try to separate the seed from the cotton. Over time, a double roller system was invented. Finally, in 1793, the version invented by Whitney actually used teeth-like projections to remove the seed from the cotton. A belt and pulley system then separated the lint from the seeds. It revolutionized the cotton industry by making it more profitable. A machine was now used to remove seeds from cotton rather than having to remove them by hand. This allowed more cotton to be processed quicker which made production of cotton more efficient for farmers. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, slavery was actually dying out in the southern United States due to how labor intensive the removal of seeds from cotton had become. Due to increased productivity, cotton became a cash crop in the South

Have you ever wondered how life was for the slaves in the South? Slaves in the South suffered through many consequences. For example, they suffered through many whippings with cow skin if they didn't obey their master, they also got separated from their family mostly the fathers, so, they can be sold to a very mean slave owner. Even if they were living a miserable life on the farms, they had their own culture and they managed to even get married in the farmland or where they worked.

“Sugar in the Blood” is a book written by Andrea Stuart, female from diverse racial setting. She was born and raised in the Caribbean Island, in particular, the Barbados. Stuart decision of writing this book comes from inspiration from her earliest ancestors while she was sitting in a library located in Barbados Museum. The library appears to be harshly air-conditioned showing the pathetic condition of her ecological niche. Stuart used census records as the primary source of information and data. Despite the limitations of genealogical study present in the library, she builds various ideas from the sources even if it yields the skeleton and not

Over the years from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, slaves were not only transported to just the United States, but to all around the world. They were sold and traded to many different countries which meant that their cultures went with them. As they would grow and multiply in an area, they would repopulate in others. Forced labor migrations contributed to globalization because when slaves of different ethnicities were shipped to other parts of the world, they took their culture and history with them.