Tag Archives: cotton

BEFORE ELI Whitney invented the cotton gin, Southern plantation owners were beginning to wonder if they should not give up their slaves. There was a good market for cotton; the English were buying all the cotton they could get to make into cloth in their new factories. It took too long to separate raw cotton from the seed and raising cotton simply did not pay. If the plantation owners stopped raising cotton, they would really have no need for slaves. Then after the invention of the cotton gin, raising cotton began to pay — and pay well! Cotton became the South’s big cash crop and the more cotton the plantation owners raised, the more slaves they needed. So, slavery grew in the South while it was dying out in other parts of the world. Slavery had been outlawed in the British colonies in 1833, in the French colonies fifteen years later; by this time, too, most of the Latin-American republics had liberated their slaves. The economy of the South was based on slave labour and the vast estates of the plantation owners, with their mansions, slave quarters and outbuildings, resembled the manors of feudal Europe. As a matter of fact, there was much in Southern society that resembled feudalism. The plantation owners formed a kind of aristocracy and lived the lives of country gentlemen; they owned most of the slaves and most of the land. The poorer Southerners also lived by farming, but their land holdings were small and they worked in the fields beside the one or two slaves they could afford. The South had little industry. In the North, on the other hand, while thousands of people still lived by farming, industry was growing day by day. The North needed free labour rather than slaves and Northerners began …

THE ENGLISH regarded themselves as a free people — but they did not seem to believe in freedom for others. Many of them were engaged in the African slave trade. They shipped manufactured goods from England to America, carried slaves across the Atlantic to the West Indies and brought cargoes of sugar and cotton back to England. It was against the law to ship slaves home to England, yet there seemed to be no law to prevent ordinary Englishmen from being treated as slaves by their own countrymen. The government did nothing to protect them from being kidnapped and forced into years of unwilling service aboard ships or on West Indian plantations. Since the public accepted such practices without much protest, it is hardly surprising that another kind of slavery was allowed to develop in England during the early period of the Industrial Revolution. At that time the large factories were run by water power, which meant they had to be located near swift-running streams in the country, often miles from any population centre from which workers could be hired. Factory owners did not have to depend upon adult workers to run their factories. Most of them used children. Hundreds of boys and girls from overcrowded poorhouses and church orphanages were turned over to factory owners. Children as young as four or five were put to work picking up bits of cotton from the floor. Older ones watched machines and tied thread together whenever there was a break. Their working day started at five or six in the morning. They had an hour or less for dinner and continued working until seven or eight in the evening. A West Indian slave master who visited one of these factories was shocked by the long hours. “I have always thought myself disgraced …