Eli Whitney's cotton gin solved one problem and helped to perpetuate a much greater one. Short-staple cotton was originally grown on a small scale in the South. The reason: Extracting seeds from the cotton bolls was a laborious, time-consuming task that could only be done by hand. Within days of his arrival on Catherine Greene's Georgia plantation in 1793, Eli Whitney solved the problem. He invented a device that pushed the cotton lint through a kind of sieve. The fibers could be pulled through the sieve, but the seeds could not. The cotton gin paved the way for massive plantings of short-staple cotton across the South and made cotton king. But the growth of cotton would come at the expense of human lives. King Cotton would be nourished with the blood of African American slaves. |
