The Changes Wrought By David Waker Lee Summary

Though many of us young readers will see this period as a dark time, Mark Fiege saw otherwise. He saw this physically beneficial and destructive to nature. Cotton was the number one growing cash crop in the nineteenth century, and is still beneficial today. “Nineteenth-century southern slavery unfolded from a symbiotic relationship between cotton and people. Synthesizing water, soil nutrients, atmospheric gases, and sunlight, cotton produced seed pods filled with a fiber and that humans found enormously useful and profitable”(102). This caused a high demand for slaves which caused the increase of costs in slaves and the kidnapping of freed slaves. While farmers were increasing in wealth and so was the population of African slaves. It marked the first time in history for the population of White folks to be smaller than the population of Africans. It had come to a point where farmers were seeking labor from the infants of slave women. However, with insufficient nutrition, the mothers bore small, weak children. But if their baby survived birth, the mothers rejoiced, for they would receive time off work to rest and nurture the children. But, the farmers grew impatient and saw work more as a priority than the newborns. “Mortality increased dramatically at those times, as cotton accumulated at the cost of children’s lives. Infancy and early childhood were a grim struggle for many enslaved children. Fewer than half survived to age five, a mortality rate roughly double that of America’s free population”(123).Though cotton provided much assistance to humans, it also caused the downfall to

Tobacco was an appealing crop for planters, for it cost pennies to purchase and sold for much more. As a result, the slave trade expanded, and many companies sought to join the lucrative trade. This is shown by the Royal African Company losing its monopoly in 1698. By 1750, blacks comprised nearly half of the population in Virginia. To ensure the preservation of racial slavery, new slave codes deemed that the children of those enslaved would also be enslaved. Thus the concept of slavery for life was established. This furthered the claim of planters that the blacks they owned were in fact property or “chattels”, making the racial basis of slavery unquestionable. It is clear that America was no longer just a society with slaves— the institution of slavery was integrated with race, the economy, politics, as well as everyday life. In addition to tobacco plantations, cotton slavery was also expanding in the Deep South. As the soil became exhausted from growing tobacco in the Chesapeake area, many slave-owners found it more profitable to sell their slaves to southern plantations. Thus, though slavery remained in the Chesapeake area, the growing cotton industry moved its epicenter to the Deep South. The major forces that caused this shift will be included in the paragraph about the end of slavery. The soil was beginning to become overused because of the intensity of tobacco

During the industrial revolution, Eli Whitney’ development of the cotton gin in the year of 1794, was an extremely popular and widely used invention throughout the United States of America. This particular machine, is capable of completely separating the seeds, from what we know as cotton. Prior to Whitney’s generous contribution, manual physical employment was necessary for this job. The cotton gin allowed quicker expansion of cotton, which quickly lead to an increase in the economy in the South. The fact that slaves were used to produce such cotton was one of the main causes for tension between the North and the South. The opposite sides had opposite views and opinions on

As we already noted – in the 1800s expediency of slavery was disputed. While industrial North almost abandoned bondage, by the early 19th century, slavery was almost exclusively confined to the South, home to more than 90 percent of American blacks (Barney W., p. 61). Agrarian South needed free labor force in order to stimulate economic growth. In particular, whites exploited blacks in textile production. This conditioned the differences in economic and social development of the North and South, and opposing viewpoints on the social structure. “Northerners now saw slavery as a barbaric relic from the past, a barrier to secular and Christian progress that contradicted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and degraded the free-labor aspirations of Northern society” (Barney W., p. 63).

Transportation in the United States has changed dramatically in the past few hundred years, from dirt roads, to canals, to railroads, and back to roads to again. Improvements in transportation between the years 1820 and 1860 allowed for almost all of America to be accessible which caused the US economy to explode. Transportation turned the U.S. into a flourishing economy and caused a large increase in sectionalism, industrialization, and expansion.

Cotton still played a big part in the growth of farming in the south. There was a high demand for textiles and cotton mills increased production of cotton bales up to 1,479,000 bales per year. While these changes were occurring in the South, many changes in farming were also taking place in other parts of the nation. The government wanted to encourage settlement in the vast areas of the country not yet populated. The Homestead Act helped shape the western landscape. This act allowed farmers to claim up to 160 acres of land. Farmers would stake a claim to a parcel of land and by living on it for five years would be free and clear to take title of the land. Or the farmer could buy

In 1794, U.S. inventor Eli Whitney patented a machine that transformed the production of cotton by significantly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber called the cotton gin. By the middle of the 19th century cotton had become America’s leading export. This gave Sothern’s the rationalization to maintain and expand slavery despite large number of abolitionists in America. While the cotton gin made cotton processing easier, it facilitated planters in earning greater profits, resulting in larger cotton crops. This in turn increased slavery because it was the cheapest form of labor. As for the North, particularly New England, the cotton gin and cotton’s increase meant a steady supply of raw materials for its textile mills.

The chapters of Baptists work, split like a body, intelligently analyze the issues and successes of the extraordinarily productive system of forced human labor in the American South. Baptist begins his narrative in 1805 with “Feet”, detailing the all too familiar march of a coffles of slaves across state lines to be put up for sale as chattel on a new plantation in market centers in Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia; Charles Ball being one link in the chain. Hundreds of thousands of steps were artfully retold by Ball on his travel to a Georgia auction block to be sold for $600 to a seasoned slave owner with newly acquired land. “Heads” goes on to illustrate the rapid acquisition of new land to facilitate the growing market through the purchase of the Louisiana territory and theft of the Yazoo lands, carving out of new slave states such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi in the process. The attainment of the Mississippi Valley was especially beneficial to the growing cotton trade as it provided an incredible shipping resource to move product down to ports and bring slaves inland more quickly from other states since President Johnson had placed a ban on new slave imports. After setting

labor” (Foner, 393). Cotton not only became the most profitable crop for the Southern farmers,

Slavery may have helped produce abundant amounts of cotton cheaply, but it also cursed those who were tangled in the grip of this “peculiar institution”.

The crops grown on plantations and the slavery system changed significantly between 1800-1860. In the early 1800s, plantation owners grew a variety of crops – cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, hemp, and wheat. Cotton had the potential to be profitable, but there was wasn’t much area where cotton could be grown. However, the invention of the cotton gin changed this - the cotton gin was a machine that made it much easier to separate the seeds from cotton. Plantation owners could now grow lots of cotton; this would make them a lot of money. As a result, slavery became more important because the demand for cotton was high worldwide. By 1860, cotton was the main export of the south. The invention of the cotton gin and high demand for cotton changed

Towards the end of the late 1700's, America was no longer under custody of Britain, instead it was a large market for industrial goods and without the doubt the world's major source for cotton, tobacco, and other agricultural products. The Market Revolution during this time was a harsh change in manual labor system originating in the south and later spreading world wide. The War of 1812, fought against Great Britain, was a time of rapid improvement in transportation, continuously growth of factories, and important development of new technology to increase agricultural production. A labor evolvement started to occur in America throughout the early 1800's, a drastic shift from an agricultural

The period between the American Revolution and the Civil War had great significance for the United States' economy. Although initially the economy seemed unstable at first, after the second war that America fought with England, the economy began to show considerable growth thereafter. This can be seen as the result of the cotton trade in the South and the eventual industrialisation of America, especially in the Northeast and later the West. From the invention of cotton gins to the adaptation of railways one can see how the United States used their opportunities and resources to their full advantage, transforming their economy to be able to compete among the worlds leading economical countries.

With the economic system, the south had a very hard time producing their main source “cotton and tobacco”. “Cotton became commercially significant in the 1790’s after the invention of a new cotton gin by Eli Whitney. (PG 314)” Let

Therefore, the population of slaves started to grow again in the 1790s and spread into other lands that became the cotton belt (Clifford, 2005). At round 1793, cotton cultivation expanded into large scale as a result of the invention of gin. The slaves in the southern states were used as laborers in spite of the American Revolution’s natural rights philosophy (Clifford, 2005). According to Clifford (2005), the slave owners started to improve the lives of their slaves on the cotton plantations after a