Georgia Cotton Kingdom

However, what counts is usage, and the cotton gin, just like the iPad, was quickly adopted.

 

Initially, Eli and his lesser-known partner Phineas Miller set up a services company, charging customers to use their cotton gins. They knew the machine was easily replicated and it didn’t take long before slaves and planters were able to copy the machine, illegally, and use it without going through Whitney. After several years and court battles, Cotton Kingdom states paid Eli close to $100,000 for his patents on the machine to end the battling, roughly $1.4M in today’s money, not much of a fortune considering his invention fueled the country’s largest economic driver.

 

The gin had an effect on Georgia. Beyond the known economic advantages of a hyper-efficient cotton economy, the gin increased demand for slave labor. This demand lead to a population boom in African slaves, who soon made up 45%, 465,698 blacks, of Georgia’s population. Only 3,500 were free men.

 

The gin created consequences, too, chief of which were ease of entry into the market. You no longer had to stoop to the level of slavery to grow cotton for a profit, and those that did own slaves found it only took 2 slaves running a cotton gin, compared to the 10-15 required to hand process equal amounts of cotton, and the gin required less time. This increase slave labor as more hands were placed to grow the fields, and it lowered the price of cotton. A letter written to planters in Hancock County, Georgia addressed the concern of over production and even soil depletion. It says “they would produce…30 bushels of Indian corn and 8 or 10 cwt. of seed cotton per acre; less than half a century has reduced their productiveness in the older states [Georgia] to 12 bushels of India corn and 3 or 4 cwt. of cotton.” The gin had made the work easier, more efficient, and more profitable.

 

Cotton was the South’s gold rush, but more profitable. The Hancock letter continues by saying, “But it may be said, as has often been said and done by the planter, the he will continue to make cotton, to buy more negroes, to make more cotton; and when his plantation is totally ruined, move to Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and finally to Texas. Shall we delude ourselves by resorting to this merely temporary expedient?”

 

No matter the cost, cotton would be profitable, and it did indeed remain profitable for Georgia. Georgia cotton production peaked in 1914 at 3.75M bushels, compared to 780,750, or 15% of national cotton production in 1859.

 

While over 200 years old, the basic functions of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin are still used in modern textile production.