If you travel across Georgia, you can see mile after mile of cotton fields but 200
years ago well that wasn't true. Most Georgia
cotton was grown only along the coast. It was known as Sea Island cotton but one
simple little invention changed all of that and it changed Georgia's history as well.
This is today, a modern cotton gin that cleans cotton and spits out the
seed so fast you can't even begin to count them.
*Whistle*
And this is a cotton gin 100
years ago. It was powered by steam and the cottonseed still seemed to fly by.
But go back more than 200 years to the 1790s and this is what it took to clean
cotton. You won't have any trouble counting the seeds, they come out one at
a time. The cotton is called upland cotton. It can grow all over Georgia but
it's very difficult to clean by hand.
Oh it's just really tough in his heart to
pull out, hurts your fingers.
Sure is slow, isn't it?
Here and this is what you're after to
make clothes out of is this lint cotton here, okay?
John Johnson is the director
of interpretation and education at Agra Rama in Tifton.
And you had to take each
seed out like that one of the time.
That take a lot a lot of time wouldn't it?
A lot of time. A lot of time.
Fact is, if you seeded cotton all day, a good worker would take about eight
hours to get one pound of this lint cotton. Cotton's real light as we know
you see? So it takes about eight hours to get that one pound.
But then, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented this, a cotton gin.
This patent model is smaller than the
original but it works the same way. Simply put some pins snag the cotton and
pull it through some slats leaving the seats behind. Even though this machine is
powered by hand it still cleans a whole lot faster.
Now the operating hand model like this, now of course the real
model would be somewhat like this actual size-wise, okay?
This being a patent model is smaller but an actual hand-cranked operating model,
generated 50 pounds of lint cotton in one day. That's a 50 fold increase is it?
That's quite significant isn't it? It'd be like taking your salary if you
made oh whatever you made. If you made $100 a day and it increased it 50 fold,
50 times your salary. Would you like a 50 50 times the increase of your salary at any
one time? Yeah? That's what this hand-cranked model did.
Okay? You can see
the economic impact that this one little hand crank gin had on the economy,
particularly the economy of the south. It's probably one of the smallest things
it has one of the largest impacts on the history of any region that I know of.
To pick cotton here, you want to take it and pull you fibers out of the bowl. Reach in
you pluck them out. Now be careful on this because this is hard work not only
is it back-breaking work but see these bowls here kind of kind of got points on
the end of them see how they and they'll start getting your fingers.
Suddenly could make money with it. Beforehand you couldn't do anything, you couldn't give
it away, and now you planted every acre available
in cotton.
And more land and more cotton meant more work. More planting and
weeding and picking and someone had to do all that back-breaking labor.
The cheapest labor was the labor you didn't have to pay. Now where did the labor come from?
Slaves.
Slavery. The the number of slaves in the South were decreasing around this time,
again we're looking at 1793 or right around the turn of the century, okay?
Then you had to have more help to do this so they turn to the use of slaves again.
*Man Singing a Slave Song*
In 1790, before the cotton gin, there were less than 30,000 slaves in Georgia. By
1860, seventy years later, just before the civil war started, the number of slaves
had increased to more than 460,000. In fact almost half the people living in
Georgia were of African descent.
As the cotton kingdom was established, the
demand for slaves went up and eventually by the 1850s, um had um, slaves and land had
become the two greatest forms of wealth in the south. In fact there was more
invested in slaves than in land. So it perpetuated as they say slavery.
Cotton was king. We all heard that thing. Cotton was king but it was built on the labor
of the many many people.
*Man Singing Slave Song*
*End Screen Music*