Cotton, however, emerged as the antebellum Souths major commercial crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar in economic importance. Karen Gerhardt Britton, After the cotton was sold and the accounts settled, the tenant or sharecropper often had little or no hard cash left over. 1000. New Orleans, the hub of commerce, boasted the largest slave market in the United States and grew to become the nations fourth-largest city as a result. Cotton compresses, huge machines that reduced 500-pound bales to about half their ginned, or flat-bale, size for convenience in shipping, were constructed along railroad rights-of-way in many towns. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. In August, after the cotton plants had flowered and the flowers had begun to give way to cotton bolls (the seed-bearing capsule that contains the cotton fiber), all the plantations slavesmen, women, and childrenworked together to pick the crop (Figure). His next book, Cotton and Race in America (1787-1930): The Human Price of Economic Growth, will be published in 2007. Despite the rhetoric of the Revolution that all men are created equal, slavery not only endured in the American republic but formed the very foundation of the countrys economic success. More than 99 percent of the cotton grown in the US is of the Upland variety, with the rest being American Pima. U.S. trade increased with France and Spain. The slave economy (article) | Khan Academy 11.3: Cotton and Slavery - Humanities LibreTexts Theirs was a world of mobility and restlessness, a constant search for the next area to grow the valuable crop. In 1879 some 2,178,435 acres produced 805,284 bales. 5 million. The 1889 census reported 3,934,525 acres producing 1.5 million bales. Agriculture in Georgia - New Georgia Encyclopedia In 2020, producers in South Carolina harvested 179,000 acres of upland cotton. "The rise of the cotton industry in California: A comparative perspective. Sorry if I am incorrect! US Department of Agriculture. A report of the missions at San Antonio in 1745 indicates that several thousand pounds of cotton were produced annually, then spun and woven by mission craftsmen. The crop grown in the South was a hybrid: Gossypium barbadense, known as Petit Gulf cotton, a mix of Mexican, Georgia, and Siamese strains. Indeed, the number of southern cotton bales exported to Europe dropped from 3 million bales in 1860 to mere thousands. ", Meikle, Paulette Ann. The North Carolina cotton crop began to grow between 1860 with 145,514 bales and 1870 with 203,000 bales (480-lb. Petersburg's Cotton Industry - Historic Petersburg Cotton production in the U.S. 2022 | Statista The key is that cotton and slaves helped define each other, at least in the cotton South. The Civil War caused a decrease in production, but by 1869 the cotton crop was reported as 350,628 bales. The Civil War (1861-65) dramatically changed the state's agricultural labor force by freeing thousands of enslaved laborers, but cotton continued to be the main crop in many parts of Georgia. [7] These bales usually measure approximately 17 cubic feet (0.48 cubic meters) and weigh 500 pounds (230 kilograms). How many bales of cotton were produced in 1860? - Answers The effort was laborious, and a white driver employed the lash to make slaves work as quickly as possible. As soon as this statistic is updated, you will immediately be notified via e-mail. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-89701. University of Oklahoma, 2002, Copyright 2023 Mississippi Historical Society [12] The quantity exported held steady, at 3,000,000 bales, but prices on the world market fell. In 1868 the combination of nitrocellulose and camphor made celluloid, an artificial plastic. New York rose to its preeminent position as the commercial and financial center of America because of cotton. Connecticuts Roger Sherman, one of the delegates who brokered the slavery compromise, assumed that the evil of slavery was dying out and would by degrees disappear. He also thought that it was best to let the individual states decide about the legality of slavery. In the early 1910s, the average yield per acre varied between states: North Carolina (290 pounds), Missouri (279 pounds), South Carolina (255 pounds), and Georgia (239 pounds); the yield in California (500 pounds) was attributed to growth on irrigated land. Furthermore, cotton supports a USD 3 trillion global fashion industry, which includes clothes with unique designs from reputed brands, with global clothing exports valued at USD 1.3 trillion in 2016. A demand for it already existed in the industrial textile mills in Great Britain, and in time, a steady stream of slave-grown American cotton would also supply northern textile mills. Cotton dictated the Souths huge role in a global economy that included Europe, New York, other New England states, and the American west. January 12, 2023. The first displays the dramatic growth of cotton production in the United States from 1790 to 1860. Fortunately for Americans whose wealth depended upon the exploitation of slave labor, a fall in the price of tobacco had caused landowners in the Upper South to reduce their production of this crop and use more of their land to grow wheat, which was far more profitable. Karen G. Britton, Bale o' Cotton (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992). A specially designed plow made it possible to break up the thick black sod, and the fertile prairie soil produced as much as one bale per acre in some areas. [24], In 2020, production totaled 14.061 million bales. [18] Three out of four black farm operators earned at least 40% of their income from cotton farming during this period. After the war, when steel and rubber became available to manufacturers again, farmers began to mechanize their methods of planting, cultivating, and harvesting, thus eliminating the need for tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom did not return to farmwork, and leading to new practices in cotton production that remain in use today. Indeed, American cotton soon made up two-thirds of the global supply, and production continued to soar. To ambitious white planters, the extent of new land available for cotton production seemed almost limitless, and many planters simply leapfrogged from one area to the next, abandoning their fields every ten to fifteen years after the soil became exhausted. Between the years 1820 and 1860, approximately 80 percent of the global cotton supply was produced in the United States. Photograph courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History, PI/1997.0006.0470. Whitney never seemed, as one historian noted, to care about slavery one way or the other.. Because of a shortage of laborers and the destructiveness of sudden storms, cotton growers in the Lubbock area developed a means of rough-harvesting cotton during the 1920s. Most New Yorkers did not care that the cotton was produced by enslaved people because for them it became sanitized once it left the plantation. Use Ask Statista Research Service. [8] This also ushered the slave trade to meet the growing need for labor to grow cotton[citation needed], a labor-intensive crop and a cash crop of immense economic worth[citation needed]. All told, the movement of slaves in the South made up one of the largest forced internal migrations in the United States. After emancipation, African Americans were still identified with cotton production. In the 1990s cotton was also planted in the Sacramento Valley. Statista. [35] Californias cotton is mostly grown in seven counties within the San Joaquin Valley, though Imperial Valley and Palo Verde Valley also have acres planted. Thus, the delegates faced the question: should there be a United States with slavery, or no United States without slavery? By the 1820s, however, people in Kentucky and the Carolinas had begun to sell many of their slaves as well. When the box is full, a tractor pulls it forward, leaving on the turnrow a "loaf" of cotton that is eight feet high by eight feet wide by thirty-two feet long. Americans were well aware of the fact that the economic value placed on an enslaved person generally correlated to the price of cotton. Farmers used calcium arsenate dust and other pesticides to reduce the damage from boll weevils and such pests as the pink bollworm. Missouri soil allows for the growth of upland cotton with the average bale weighing approximately five hundred pounds. Strippers are used to harvest cotton in the Plains region, where plants are small and grow close to the ground. Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860). By the late 1920s around two-thirds of all African-American tenants and almost three-fourths of the croppers worked on cotton farms. [21] By the 1950s, after many years of development, the mechanical cotton picker had become effective enough to be commercially viable, and it quickly gained appeal and affordability throughout the U.S. cotton growing area. By 1860, Georgia alone produced 701,840 bales of cotton, establishing it as the fourth-largest cotton-growing state. It expanded to the west very dramatically after 1800all the way to Texasthanks to the cotton gin. In 1793, Eli Whitney revolutionized the production of cotton when he invented the cotton gin, a device that separated the seeds from raw cotton. Entire old-growth forests and cypress swamps fell to the axe as slaves labored to strip the vegetation to make way for cotton. The 1850s were a boom time for cotton factories. krispyKyle krispyKyle 05/01/2017 History College answered About how many millions of bales of cotton were produced in the south in 1860 See answers Advertisement Advertisement swalla swalla 4,000,000 or four million . When the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded, providing economic opportunities for whites involved in many aspects of the trade and increasing the possibility of slaves dislocation and separation from kin and friends. But this domestic cotton market paled in comparison to the Atlantic market. Eli Whitney (1765-1825) Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-8283. Northern mills depended on the South for supplies of raw cotton that was then converted into textiles. In, US Department of Agriculture. In general, planters expected a good hand, or slave, to work ten acres of land and pick two hundred pounds of cotton a day. Nearly all the exported cotton was shipped to Great Britain, fueling its burgeoning textile industry and making the powerful British Empire increasingly dependent on American cotton and southern slavery. . 12. Other white men could benefit from the trade as owners of warehouses and pens in which slaves were held, or as suppliers of clothing and food for slaves on the move. [citation needed]. Not surprisingly, given these figures, the southern economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Virginia and Maryland therefore took the lead in the domestic slave trade, the trading of slaves within the borders of the United States.

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