The Carter Farm

The Carter Farm. The Cotton Gin. Southern farming was transformed as the 19th century dawned. Subsistence farming and plantations devoted to tobacco, rice, and sugar cane had long been dominant. Two events changed the agricultural formula., First, Eli Whitney invented the improved cotton gin (short for “Engine”) in 1793, enabling the mass processing of a crop once deemed too labor-intensive to grow. The gin vastly shortened the time needed and made cotton extremely lucrative. Second, President Andrew Jackson’s forced removal of the Native populations from areas that would become the states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as Tennessee, opened rich farmland to cotton production., The gin consisted of a rotating drum with teeth, a screen, hooks, and a brush. Slaves placed cotton bools into the top of the gin and rotated the drum, and the teeth separated the cotton fibers. Hooks grabbed the fibers and pulled them through a screen that filtered out the seeds. Clean, seed-free fibers were than brushed away. One slave could process fifty pounds of cotton per day – more in purpose-built factories. Without the gin, one worker needed ten hours to separate the seeds from the fibers of one pound of cotton., Cotton quickly became “King” and the demand for slaves to grow the crop surged. There were 700,000 slaves in the United States in 1790, and in 1792, 139,000 pounds of cotton were exported. By 1860, there were 3.9 million slaves and a staggering 1.7 billion pounds of cotton exported., Cotton solidified the South’s dependence on slave labor for economic prosperity.