Cotton and Prices

Explain the cotton gin, how high prices led to more cotton, tobacco, and textiles, and how this spread slavery.

Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.

What children learn in Level 54

Cotton was hard to clean, because its sticky seeds had to be pulled out by hand. One person might clean about a pound a day.
In 1793, in Georgia, Eli Whitney built the cotton gin, a machine that pulled the seeds out. With it, one worker could clean about 50 pounds a day. That's a huge jump in productivity.
A price can push people to act. That's a price incentive. When a crop's price rises, people grow more. When mills could sell cloth for more, they made more. British mills wanted all the cotton they could get.
Here's what happened. Many people expected machines to reduce slavery. Instead, high cotton prices made planters want more land and more enslaved workers. Look how both numbers grew.
Slavery spread west, onto land taken from American Indian nations. Many enslaved families were split apart by sales. A Georgia law even tried to stop them from learning to read.
Enslaved people resisted every way they could. They slowed their work, kept their families and faith, and learned to read in secret. In 1848, William and Ellen Craft escaped from Macon, Georgia. Ellen dressed as a white man, with William posing as a servant.

Georgia Standards of Excellence in Social Studies:

SS4E1.b — Explain how price incentives affect people's behavior and choices: decisions about what crops (e.g., cotton, and tobacco) to grow and products (e.g., textiles) to produce.
SS4E1.f — Give examples of technological advancements and their impact on business productivity during the development of the United States (e.g., cotton gin, steamboat, steam locomotive, and telegraph).