Negative Effects Of The Cotton Gin

The cotton gin had many effects. I believe that the cotton gin effected people in a negative and positive way and it also helped pave way for many other important inventions we use today.
The cotton gin was a machine that basically made collecting cotton much easier the way the cotton gin worked was cotton was run through a wooden drum embedded with a series of hooks that caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through but the hooks pulled the cotton fibers through with ease. Smaller gins could be cranked by hand; larger ones could be powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine. Whitney’s hand-cranked machine could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day. The man who
Another impact could be that because of the cotton gin there was a major increase in slave states people were even smuggling in slaves if they had to. Also something else I believe to be a negative effect is that because the cotton gin was invented when other crops were in decline, cotton was one of the only reliable cash crops for plantation owners. With cotton responsible for nearly 60% of America's exports, the U.S. was completely dependent upon cotton this is a negative because being dependent upon one crop could lead to downfall later if there is a decrease in this product or if something happens so that you can’t get this product anymore meaning that you should never depend on just one product. Another not so important impact was that when the cotton gin was released and Eli Whitney got his patent people found loopholes in the patent and created their own cotton gin that didn’t break the patent therefore they could legally do that. “After the invention of the cotton gin, the yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800. Demand was fueled by other inventions of the Industrial Revolution, such as the machines to spin and weave it and the steamboat to transport it. By midcentury America was growing three-quarters of the world's supply of cotton, most of it shipped to England or New England where it was manufactured into cloth. During this time tobacco fell in value, rice exports at best stayed steady, and sugar began to thrive, but only in Louisiana. At midcentury the South provided three-fifths of America's exports -- most of it in cotton.” This article shows that because of the cotton gin most of America became dependent upon