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The cotton gin has been used as an argument for why slavery finally became unacceptable. Until then society “needed” slaves to do the work, but with the cotton gin and other automations the costs of slavery started becoming higher than the value.

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CarnivorousCouch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
My understanding is that the cotton gin led to more slavery as cotton production became more profitable. The machine could process cotton but not pick it, so more hands were needed for field work.

Wiki:

The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.[35] While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[36] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850."

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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  That is also true, the cotton gin wasn’t the total economic turning point, and the Civil War pre-dated automation’s economic turning of the corner against some economic measures of slavery’s cost, but slavery has very difficult to quantify costs, it was an entrenched lifestyle much more than a pool of day labor hanging out at Home Depot waiting for work, where both employers and employees could easily change their ways on very short notice.
  
  After the Civil War it looks like “free person” cotton harvesting labor persisted until about 1926 - that could have changed earlier, but farm owners needed a kick in the butt to figure out how to improve:
  
  printmag.com/…/lessons-from-cottons-slow-motion-r…
  
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