The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

232 Chapter 8 Toward a National Economy

cities grew in size and number, the need to feed the
populace caused commercial agriculture to flourish.
Dairy farming, truck gardening, and fruit growing
began to thrive around every manufacturing center.

Cotton Revolutionizes the South

By far the most important indirect effect of industri-
alization occurred in the South, which soon began
to produce cotton to supply the new textile factories
of Great Britain and New England. The possibility
of growing large amounts of this crop in America
had not been seriously considered in colonial times,
but by the 1780s the demand for raw cotton to feed
the voracious British mills was causing many
American farmers to experiment with the crop.
Most of the world’s cotton at this time came from
Egypt, India, and the East Indies. The plant was
considered tropical, most varieties being unable to
survive the slightest frost. Hamilton, who missed
nothing that related to the economic growth of the
country, reported, “It has been observed... that
the nearer the place of growth to the equator, the
better the quality of the cotton.”
Beginning in 1786, “sea-island” cotton was
grown successfully in the mild, humid lowlands and
offshore islands along the coasts of Georgia and
South Carolina. This was a high-quality cotton,
silky and long-fibered like the Egyptian kind. But its
susceptibility to frost severely limited the area of its

cultivation. Elsewhere in the South, “green-seed,”

or upland, cotton flourished, but this plant had lit-

tle commercial value because the seeds could not be

easily separated from the lint. When sea-island cot-

ton was passed between two rollers, its shiny black

seeds simply popped out; with

upland cotton the seeds were

pulled through with the lint and

crushed, the oils and broken bits

destroying the value of the fiber.

To remove the seeds by hand was

laborious; a slave working all day

could clean scarcely a pound of the

white fluff. This made it an uneco-

nomical crop. In 1791 the usually

sanguine Hamilton admitted in his

Report on Manufacturesthat “the

extensive cultivation of cotton can,

perhaps, hardly be expected.”

Early American cotton manufac-

turers used the sea-island variety or

imported the foreign fiber, in the

latter case paying a duty of 3 cents a

pound. However, the planters of

South Carolina and Georgia, suffer-

ing from hard times after the

Revolution, needed a new cash crop.

Rice production was not expanding,

and indigo, the other staple of the

area, had ceased to be profitable

4,000,000

3,500,000

3,000,000

2,500,000

2,000,000

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

0

1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860

Slave population

Bales of Cotton and Number of Slaves Cotton production,

in bales

Cotton Production and Slave Population, 1800–1860As the

number of slaves increased, the production of cotton increased also.

In 2005 historian Angela Lakwete used this print as the cover of Inventing the Cotton Gin:
Machine and Myth in Antebellum Americato show that devices similar to that “invented” by
Eli Whitney in 1793 had long been in use in the South. The human details in the image are
revealing as well.