Economic Impacts of Slavery

Slavery has existed for over hundreds of years; there have been numerous amounts of social, economical, and political impacts of slavery throughout the entire world. I believe that the economics in slavery in the United States were more significant than the social and political impacts of slavery. Slavery has proved that it has had an impact on economy in a different way by the invention of the cotton gin in 1790, the price of owning slaves, and the slave trade. One of the main economic impacts of slavery was the actual cost of slavery in general. Enslaved people were the capital: four million worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined.” (Johnson) This shows that slaves actually cost a lot of money.
Another main economic impact of slavery was the invention of the cotton gin. “By 1840, cotton is more valuable than everything else the United States exports put together, so the value of slaves is tremendous.” (Horton) The slave population in the south grew to about half a million. Slave labor was necessary to run southern plantations. It took a lot of labor for slaves to plant, tend, and pick the cotton, and work on it with the gin. This made it so it was more efficient to make cotton and increased the growth of slavery because now they were able to process more cotton, which lead to an increase in the amount of cotton farms, which lead to an increased need for slaves. This shows that the invention of the cotton gin had a large impact on the United States