How did the cotton gin affect south?
It made the south’s dependence on slave labor even greater. Before the cotton gin, cotton had to be hand-carded, to try to get the seeds out of the cotton bolls. This was a slow, labor-intensive process, and cotton was not a popular crop. After the cotton gin, the bolls could easily be deseeded, and cotton quickly became a staple crop of large scale plantation operators. The cotton grew best in the deep south, which was just being settled. Importation of new slaves was forbidden after 1808, so slaves were purchased in the upper south, where tobacco lands were played out, and sent south (“sold down the river”) to toil in the new cotton belt area. Large plantation operators made fortunes selling the new crop to the new mills, which were just being developed, to weave the cotton into cloth. Rich people tend to have disproportionate political power, and since they had made their money using slaves to grow cotton, they naturally tended to defend the system which had made them wealthy.
