What scientific experiments were the slaves conducting in the cotton fields? How to survive a rape and bull whip in 100 degree weather?
Joe y'all really be throwin me how you jump on that e-soapbox and shout crazy things like this.![]()
Prior to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton farming was small potatoes compared to other crops (Hemp was the money maker back then. It's what George Washington grew). With this invention, the US economy exploded. The cotton gin, a scientific invention, not only greased the US economic engine, it was the primary cause of chattel slavery's expansion in the United States.
Lewis Cecil Gray's History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, Volume 1
If you'd pick up this book, you'd find out that this period after the invention of the cotton gin is referred to as The Second Middle Passage. Vast amounts of slaves were moved from the coasts to places inland as far as Texas. They were importing so many slaves in this period, they had to create a law to stop importation. Illegal slave importation was called piracy, punishable by death. The black population at that time was never higher, as a percentage (1 in 5 persons in America were black), in the United States since.
Please tell me why the US slave population quadrupled, after the invention of the cotton gin, if scientific exploration, although morally reprehensible in its application here, has not been the primary driving force of the US economy.
Addendum: What we're not taught in school is that white folks even enslaved there own right up to the 1860's as well. I had an emancipated ancestor who owned both black and white slaves. And I'm not talking about indentured servitude.
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