March 14, 1794: Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. Other cotton gins existed before this however, but Whitney’s version took off and fundamentally reshaped the American economy. Its role in the economic development of the U.S. was directly and inseparably connected to the system of racial slavery, which enabled cotton production successes. As historian Angela Lakwete writes, “The tragedies of slavery and the Civil War stifle the impulse to celebrate southern achievement in a success narrative centered on the cotton gin. While the gin bore no causal relationship to slavery, it processed cotton, the commodity most associated with nineteenth-century American slavery. It matters little whether it was a roller or saw gin. Neither exerted causal influences but both were integral factors in the development of a slave labor-based southern economy. Yet regional and racial integrity is risked when failure is layered onto the accomplishments of individuals who successfully exploited as well as negotiated the complexities of the slave South.”
Recommended reading to learn more:
Citations: David C. Hinman, “Eli Whitney,” engraving on paper (location unknown, 1847), collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), public domain, https://www.si.edu/object/eli-whitney:npg_NPG.86.86; Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 177, 192, https://archive.org/details/inventingcottong0000lakw.
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