One of the most significant inventions of the American Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin turned cotton …

In hopes of making a patentable machine, Whitney put aside his plans to study law and instead tinkered throughout the winter and spring in a secret workshop provided by Catherine Greene.

One way to examine the importance of the cotton gin is to read about the lives of slaves on cotton plantations.

Some cotton farmers used a type of cotton gin, but it wasn’t very effective and broke often. Before the cotton gin, slavery had been on its way out—farmers realized it was more expensive to maintain slaves, compared to the value of what they could produce. The promise of cotton profits encouraged a spectacular rise in the direct importation of African slaves in the years before the trans-Atlantic trade was made illegal in 1808. Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural products. After Eli Whitney unveiled his cotton gin, processing cotton became much easier, resulting in greater availability and cheaper cloth. Eli Whitney's Patent for the Cotton Gin Background Eli Whitney and the Need for an Invention. Plantation owners found they needed more slaves in the field to meet the increased ability of the gin. Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765–January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, manufacturer, and mechanical engineer who invented the cotton gin. The South was beginning to let the slaves stop working until the cotton gin came and made the process easier. Also, Reconstruction historian and law professor Paul Finkleman argued in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities that the common perception of slavery as a dying institution before the cotton gin’s invention is misguided. Cotton and African-American Life 22b. The second description, provided by Solomon Northrup, includes descriptions of the cotton gin’s importance to individual plantations and descriptions of the difficulty of working in the cotton fields. Growth and Entrenchment of Slavery. Life before the cotton gin for people was a bit harder they had to hand pick the cotton themselves The only type of cotton that was grown for profit was the long-staple type of the crop that was only grown off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on the Sea Islands. The process was very slow and took a lot of manual labor; the gin however was able to do just that. As Eli Whitney left New England and headed South in 1792, he had no idea that within the next seven months he would invent a machine that would profoundly alter the course of American history. Cotton was a troublesome crop anyway; its fiber could only be separated from the sticky, embedded seeds by hand, a grueling and exhausting process. The promise of cotton profits encouraged a spectacular rise in the direct importation of African slaves in the years before the trans-Atlantic trade was made illegal in 1808. Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765–January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, manufacturer, and mechanical engineer who invented the cotton gin. Only the largest plantations found raising cotton cost effective. Before the cotton gin cotton, deseeding relied heavily on slave labor. The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as calico, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. The invention of the cotton gin … Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 or 1794. One of the most significant inventions of the American Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin turned cotton into a highly profitable crop. Before the invention of the cotton gin, not only was the raising of cotton very labor intensive, but separating the fiber from the cotton seed itself was even more labor intensive.