Technological innovation is generally a good thing, but the cotton gin, although it revolutionized the American cotton industry, also arguably led to the American Civil War with great loss of life. 

A cotton gin is short for ‘cotton engine’.  It separates the cotton fibers from the rest of the seed pod. This was difficult to do by hand due the stickiness of the seeds that made it difficult to manually get the fibers away from the pod itself.  The wire screen and wire hooks of the cotton gin automated this process, and suddenly, from being a labor intensive job that made the extraction of the fibers from the pod a difficult and expensive job, the cotton industry was invigorated.  

There was suddenly a rapidly increasing demand for cotton to feed the new cotton engines. Arable land was converted from agriculture to cotton, and a demand for cheap labor started to increase.  Slavery, already relatively common in the Southern states of America, boomed.  Slaves were required to operate the cotton gins themselves.  It was an ideal way for the cotton industry to have their machines manned by people who did not have to be paid in any way except with food and cheap lodgings.  

There was an even greater demand in the cotton fields.  There was still no machine invented to facilitate the picking of the cotton from the plant, and this too was a job that could easily be carried out by unskilled and untrained labor. There was not even a necessity for training, so verbal communication could be kept at a minimum, and new slaves who could not speak English could be shown how to do the job by other slaves. 

The economy of the Southern states rapidly changed due to the invention of the cotton gin. Farming for food became almost extinct due to the large amount of money that could be made by growing cotton, and the supply of food in that part of America was greatly reduced.  The era of the cotton plantation began, when vast tracts of farmland were switched over to the growing of cotton.  

Slavery, which had largely grown out of favor with most Americans, suddenly came back into fashion. This was partially due to the influx of immigrants into the United States around that time. Labor from the immigrants was cheap, but as the demands of the cotton industry grew, the work demands made on the immigrants became more that they were prepared to accept without increases in pay.   

As the cotton gins became more and more efficient, the demand for more and more cotton grew, and more and more demands were made on the workers.  The requirements of cotton eventually became essential to the livelihood of those that grew the cotton. It was more likely that the lifestyles they were used were being eroded due to the increasing demands and the unwillingness of the employees to carry out the backbreaking work without suitable compensation. 

This fuelled the increasing need for more slaves, and the slave trade was given a new lease of life.  Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, the cotton industry in the USA was low key, but with its introduction it became big business.  Slave ships came to the South in increasing regularity, with products passed onto them from British and European slavers, and also slave boats from America itself.   

Many of these slaves were passed to the slavers by African tribes that raided other villages for slaves that they could trade with the European and American slavers.  This demand for slaves increasingly grew in tandem with the increasing demand for cotton.  People wanted cotton for clothes, bed linen and even for explosives. The demand grew and grew as the cotton gins were developed and became more efficient and were able to separate cotton from the sticky residues faster and faster. 

It became easier for plantation owners to breed their own slaves than purchase them, and ultimately it can be argued that the cotton gin was the cause of all these deaths that occurred during the Civil War.  

Technological innovation fuelled slavery all right, and the cotton gin was at the center of it.  

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