United States History Student Edition

Cotton Production, 1820–1860 Agriculture was very profitable in the South. By 1860, much of the South was devoted to raising cotton.

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Major cotton-producing areas 1820 Major cotton-producing areas 1860 Present day borders

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GEOGRAPHY CONNECTION 1. Exploring Regions In which region did cotton expand most, the Upper South or the Deep South? 2. Human-Environment Interaction Which states went from having no cotton production in 1820 to having major cotton-producing areas in 1860?

The use of the cotton gin had important consequences . It encouraged farmers to grow more cotton in more places. Because Southern planters relied on enslaved people to plant and pick their cotton, the demand for slave labor increased. As a result, slavery spread across a larger area of the South. By 1860, the Deep South and the Upper South remained agricultural, but each region concentrated on different crops. The Upper South grew more tobacco, hemp, wheat, and vegetables, and the Deep South produced more cotton, as well as rice and sugarcane. As a part of the Deep South, the northern part of Florida surrounding Tallahassee became a cotton-producing region. As cotton and sugar production expanded, the sale of enslaved Africans and African Americans became a big business. The Upper

However, raising a cotton crop took much labor. After the harvest, workers had to separate the plant’s sticky seeds from the cotton fibers, which was very time consuming. The Cotton Gin and King Cotton In 1793, an inventor from Connecticut named Eli Whitney solved the problem of cotton processing with a device called the cotton gin. Whitney’s invention pulled cotton fibers through a set of wire teeth mounted on a spinning cylinder to quickly and easily remove the seeds. His invention was simple to use and could be operated with the use of a hand crank or driven by a horse or with water power. With the cotton gin, productivity (proh•duhk•TIH•vuh•tee)—the amount a worker could produce in a given time—increased dramatically. The cotton gin helped workers process 50 times more cotton each day than they could by hand. productivity a measure of how much a worker can produce with a given amount of time and effort

process to prepare consequence a result

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