Growth of slavery w/the cotton gin
After hearing that it took almost as many slaves to remove seeds as it did to pick cotton, Eli Whitney decided to invent the cotton gin, a machine that will reduce the number of slaves needed to pick out the seeds in cotton. His invention took the jobs of several slaves in one day separating seeds and shrunk it down to just an hour of work using the cotton gin.
Even though Eli Whitney's invention was supposed to reduce the amount of labor and slaves needed, it instead shot up the production of cotton, which increased the demand of even larger plantations and the amount of slaves. After the cotton gin was invented, the yield of raw cotton doubled every decade after the 1800's and almost three-fifths of America's exports was cotton. By 1860, 1 in 3 of the Southerners in America was a slave and by mid century we were growing three-quarters of the world's supply of cotton.