The Cotton Gin's Effect On The Civil War

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I believe the cotton gin had a huge effect on the civil war because when the “gin”was produced in 1794, it made the production of cotton a lot easier on slaves. This ended up doing the opposite of its intended use and and sparked the need for more slaves, this was a big reason the Civil War ever started.

According to artifact civilwar.org, The South depended on cotton so when the cotton farms became bigger, so did the population of slaves. In there were so many cotton farms and slaves that in 1830 only 750,000 bales were produced, in 1850 that amount had exploded into 2.85 million bales according to artifact civilwar.org. There was so much cotton the south was thriving with all this money and they believed that they couldn’t afford to lose it.
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in Mississippi 55% of the population were slaves. Slaves were everything to the South that’s why they did not want to have to lose them, without them they believed that the economy of the South would crash. Was it Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin that caused this, a lot of people would agree that it was but I think that the intentions were to cut down on the amount of slaves and try to make is so that slaveholders didn’t need as many slaves to get the same amount of cotton.

As said in artifact 1 two thirds of the cotton supply came from the South, in 1860 each slave was producing a bale of cotton a year. The slaves ran the agriculture in the South because of the cotton gin, the cotton gin was not invented to bring more slaves into the U.S. but to make it easier for slaves and slaveholders to receive cotton but ironically got used for the wrong intentions and became a way for slaveholders to purchase more slaves to make more money as shown from the data of the United States Department of