Joe Snuffy 06 June 13, 2016
A Profitable America
In the South, Years before the civil war the American people began learning what and how to grow huge cash crops. The Cash Crop would change the more people learned about this new great Nation. In the beginning America began learning how profitable it is to grow these cash crops the cash crops they would grow was cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar. These were all very profitable for the American at the time. America was a land that was new and could be easily farmed. Much of American land was still very open and vast. (” Growth,” 2016)
“In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized the production of cotton when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton”. Suddenly it was much easier and much more profitable to sell cotton in America. Before this invention of the cotton gin, cotton was a relatively expensive product because how labor intensive it was to pick and separate cotton by hand. The cotton now was able to be comb through at fast rate and faster than ever before. Cotton gin with its “teeth” could process the cotton rather than numerous slaves needing it to pick it by hand. However, the cotton gin didn’t lower the amount of slaves need in the states but rather increased the need for slaves in the south. This bombing industry would raise the amount of slaves needed and would more than doubled his amount. From the original amount standing at about 700,000 in 1790 to roughly 3.2 million in 1850 (”Growth,” 2016)
Cotton by itself was a great product. This Product could be easily stored and easily shipped. Not only was this product readily able to be shipped but at this time the cotton gin was an American made technology which no one else had. Soon this product became a “primary export in the U.S., and by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the southern states were providing two-thirds of the world's supply of cotton.”. This was only the tip of the iceberg, the Cotton gin began being...