"Whitney Watching the Cotton Gin," one lone white man regarding the machine, makes a serious and symbolic ommission. For the story of the signifiance of the cotton gin in American history is really one of two races -- white and black -- and the power relations between them.

Slavery had been a part of the North American colonies almost as long as there had been colonies. There are records of black slave-holding in Virginia as far back as 1619. (Bailyn, p. 37.) Though black slavery had long been a feature of the Southern colonies, Southen economy was not dependent on those social conditions until Whitney's cotton gin.

Indeed, up until 1793, the economic viability of slave-holding was waning. Only a big export cash crop would make the purchase and maintenance of so much labor (to dehumanize the term) cost effective. And Southerners were floundering for such a crop. Tobacco depleted soil too quickly. Rice, indigo, corn, and wheat didn't make much money. (Wilson, p. 78) And the laborious deseeding of most cotton (all but Sea Island Cotton, which could only be grown along the coast) made it too labor-intensive to reap any profit.

Thus, with a few exceptions, agriculture in the South prior to the 1970s was essentially a cottage industry, and that human scale made for more human conditions. Before the nineteenth century, there was at least some understanding that slavery was an unfortunate business, and the permissive but still relatively uncruel priniciples of Jefferson and Washington, who abided by the system but did not defend it, made for a society in which freeing slaves and planning manumission upon the master's death was becoming relatively common.

But Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton cultivation suddenly fantastically profitable, and the cost for many hands to tend and pick the cotton reaped increasing returns -- thus the advent of large slave-holding plantations, the conditions of which were notoriously inhumane. In popular literature of the day, including Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, blacks and whites alike recognized that the worst fate of a slave was being sold downriver, presumably to be sold to the cotton plantations of the deep South.

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