Cotton, the Gin, and the Slave Economy

In seventeen ninety-three, a twenty-seven-year-old Yale graduate named Eli Whitney was staying at a Georgia plantation called Mulberry Grove, the estate of Catherine Greene, widow of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene. Within weeks he had sketched out a machine for separating cotton fiber from its seed, a job that enslaved workers had done by hand at an agonizing rate of about one pound per person per day. Whitney's cotton engine, the cotton gin, could process fifty pounds a day. A large version could do two hundred and fifty.

Whitney thought his invention would reduce the demand for enslaved labor. He was catastrophically wrong. By making cotton profitable at industrial scale, the gin made enslaved labor exponentially more valuable. The year before the gin's invention, Georgia produced about one thousand bales of cotton. By eighteen thirty, it produced more than three hundred thousand. The price of enslaved people rose with every new acre brought under cultivation.

By eighteen sixty, Georgia was one of the wealthiest states in the Union, and that wealth was almost entirely built on the labor of roughly four hundred and sixty thousand enslaved people, more than forty percent of the state's total population. The great plantations of middle Georgia, the white columned houses set among sea-island cotton fields, were not simply a way of life. They were a system of organized terror maintained by law, by violence, and by the deliberate destruction of family, language, and culture.

Georgia's Black population did not accept this passively. Resistance took every form available: feigning illness, slowing work, running away to the North or to Spanish Florida, and occasionally open rebellion, though the consequences of discovery were severe. The enslaved people of Georgia brought with them from West Africa knowledge of rice cultivation, of indigo dyeing, of medicinal plants, of tidal engineering, expertise without which the Georgia low country could not have been developed at all. The wealth was theirs first, in every way that mattered.