The World of Cotton
The introduction of cotton cultivation in the Southern states in the 1780s transformed plantation slavery in the newly independent United States. Bondspeople sowed the soil between March and April.
When the plants were mature, bolls containing the white cotton fibers and seeds hung from the extremities of the branches. Between July and November, enslaved men, women, and children spent long hours harvesting cotton by hand, plucking the fluffy white fibers from the bolls. Until the late eighteenth century, processing cotton was a time-consuming activity. After harvesting the bolls, enslaved workers separated the lint from the seeds attached to the fibers, again working by hand. But the invention of the cotton gin in 1795 mechanized this lengthy work, making separating the fibers from the seeds a much faster process.69Cotton gins were initially powered by horses or mules, but by the 1830s the creation of steam engines and large presses for baling cotton dramatically increased plantations’ productivity. Still, production relied entirely on enslaved workers. Bondspeople were required to handpick larger amounts of cotton to respond to the greater demand from Britain where cotton was transformed into yarn and textiles, feeding the flourishing Industrial Revolution.70 In the US South, enslaved people also operated the new machinery.
Slave traders fed the cotton boom by selling enslaved people from states such as Virginia and Maryland to the Deep South; New Orleans became the largest slave market from which enslaved people were sold. The intensification of the domestic slave trade, as we will see in chapter 15, propelled the illegal enslavement of free Black men, women, and children, who were kidnapped and sold into slavery to the Southern cotton-producing regions. The story of Northup, mentioned earlier in this chapter and featured in the award-winning motion picture 12 Years a Slave, is certainly the most well-known depiction of this tragic period.
Born free in New York, he was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841, then sold and sent into slavery in Louisiana, where he lived in bondage for twelve years. In his narrative published in 1853, Northup provided one of the most detailed descriptions of how cotton was produced during the last twenty years of slavery in the United States. He explained how an enslaved person was required to handpick as much as two hundred pounds of cotton on a daily basis: “An ordinary day’s work is two hundred pounds. A slave who is accustomed to picking, is punished, if he or she brings in a less quantity than that.â€71 Planters, managers, and overseers controlled the work of enslaved cotton pickers to make maximum profit. As put by Northup, “no matter how fatigued and weary he may be—no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest—a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight—if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer.â€72 After picking all the cotton in a row of plants, bondspeople left unopened bolls for another picking. Because the bolls matured at different intervals, enslaved workers returned to the same plants several times during the harvest, which is why cotton plantations could be smaller in size than sugar and coffee plantations but still highly productive.After the invention of the cotton gin and the screw press, cotton production witnessed an extraordinary growth. Slavery expanded to the interior of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and even Texas.73 Because of the prohibition of slave imports from Africa, enforced in 1808, more than ever the wombs of enslaved women became the site of production of new enslaved people. The number of slaves dramatically increased from 697,624 in 1790 to 3,953,760 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.74 This growth, intended to sustain the expansion of cotton industry, relied on the institution of slavery. Simply put, bondspeople provided coerced labor to cotton planters who extracted their work through violence and control.
During the cotton era, which dominated the last fifty years of slavery in the United States, enslaved men, women, and children were expected to pick and process more cotton, working harder and faster than they ever did before, to make the project of Southern slave owners and cotton planters possible.75 Thanks to the introduction of new machinery, nineteenth-century cotton production fueled Britain’s industrialization, therefore marking a new phase of the capitalist world order. Just as the rise of sugar plantations in the Americas had propelled the development of merchant capitalism in the sixteenth century, the mechanized production of sugar and cotton in the early nineteenth century drove the Industrial Revolution.76