Now wait one cotton pickin' minute! The ginny merely processed the cotton after cultivation. It still required human labor to seed it, tend it, grow it, and pick it.
So all the cotton gin did was improve the economy of scale of post-processing and increase profit efficiency, thus expanding the farming of the crop.
Net increase of slave labor for cotton farming, because it became a highly sought after commodity in the textiles trade.
It would have, eventually. The issue was that the different cotton bolls mature at different rates on each stalk. Early mechanical harvesters would destroy the plant on the first pass, losing 3/4 to 4/5ths of the harvest. The different maturation rates is also why cotton needed slave labor; one couldn't just hire some farm hands for a week or two during harvest season, like tobacco plantations were able to. Each cotton field would have to be picked several times over the course of a 2-3 month long harvest season.
It wasn't until the 1950s that IH created the first commercially successful mechanical cotton picker. More recent selective breeding and genetic modification had made the cotton bolls mature at the same time.
The labor-intensive nature of cotton harvesting was the primary reason for the use of slave labor on cotton plantations.
I sometimes like to speculate about how events would have developed if the early textile mills had settled on a different natural fiber, rather than cotton. Flax and Hemp come to mind. Their harvesting process is less labor intensive than cotton, the extraction and preparation of the fibers is heavily labor intensive. On the other hand, that process can be (and has been) heavily mechanized. Perhaps slavery would have quietly died out in the US, as the founding fathers had believed it would have, if British and Northern US textile mills hadn't dramatically increased the demand for cotton, turning a somewhat obscure plant into a major cash crop.
Now wait one cotton pickin' minute! The ginny merely processed the cotton after cultivation. It still required human labor to seed it, tend it, grow it, and pick it.
So all the cotton gin did was improve the economy of scale of post-processing and increase profit efficiency, thus expanding the farming of the crop.
Net increase of slave labor for cotton farming, because it became a highly sought after commodity in the textiles trade.
It would have, eventually. The issue was that the different cotton bolls mature at different rates on each stalk. Early mechanical harvesters would destroy the plant on the first pass, losing 3/4 to 4/5ths of the harvest. The different maturation rates is also why cotton needed slave labor; one couldn't just hire some farm hands for a week or two during harvest season, like tobacco plantations were able to. Each cotton field would have to be picked several times over the course of a 2-3 month long harvest season.
It wasn't until the 1950s that IH created the first commercially successful mechanical cotton picker. More recent selective breeding and genetic modification had made the cotton bolls mature at the same time.
The labor-intensive nature of cotton harvesting was the primary reason for the use of slave labor on cotton plantations.
source: https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/machines_15.html
I sometimes like to speculate about how events would have developed if the early textile mills had settled on a different natural fiber, rather than cotton. Flax and Hemp come to mind. Their harvesting process is less labor intensive than cotton, the extraction and preparation of the fibers is heavily labor intensive. On the other hand, that process can be (and has been) heavily mechanized. Perhaps slavery would have quietly died out in the US, as the founding fathers had believed it would have, if British and Northern US textile mills hadn't dramatically increased the demand for cotton, turning a somewhat obscure plant into a major cash crop.