Cotton industry history

Cotton has played an important role in the growth and development of U.S. agriculture, industry, and trade almost from the birth of the nation. The invention of the cotton gin (which reduced the time needed to remove cottonseed from the cotton fiber) by Eli Whitney in 1793 set off an almost continuous increase in production that did not cease until the 1930s. From 10,000 bales produced in 1793, cotton production expanded to almost 4 million bales in 1860, the largest commercial crop in the South and the mainstay of its entire economy and of SLAVERY.

The slave plantations had been managed centrally. Although following the Civil War farmers who owned small amounts of land produced some cotton, most of the crop would again be grown by large-scale landlords who now organized tenant plantations, renting parcels of land to families who worked with varying degrees of supervision. Until the 1940s, cotton dominated life from the Carolinas through Texas, an area referred to as the “Cotton Belt,” at the center of which were cotton tenant plantations.

Since World War I, wide year-to-year fluctuations but no discernible trend had occurred in total U.S. cotton production due to governmental programs and yield variability. Only following World War II did the tractor and mechanical cotton harvester sweep away the 19th-century production methods of lots of labor, a mule, and a plow. U.S. farmers now produce the same quantity of cotton with about one-third less land than in the 1920s. Rising yields have resulted from the rapid substitution of new and improved production practices, industrial inputs (e.g., pesticides, varieties, and fertilizers), and capital (i.e., mechanization and irrigation) for land and labor. Accordingly, cotton production has shifted to land well suited to mechanization and from production under rainfall conditions to irrigation. These shifts have been both within and between major producing areas in the Southeast and the newer areas in the West. Thus, cotton farmers are now important producers from California to the Carolinas but comprise a broken, instead of continuous, Cotton Belt.

Millions of cotton farmers and workers, primarily African Americans, left the South during the post–World War II years, settling primarily in northern and western cities. Although many of them were displaced by machines and chemicals, most abandoned the cotton fields for what they hoped would be a life of greater freedom and opportunity.

See also WHITNEY, ELI.

Further reading

• Andrews, Mildred G. The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989. 
• Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Macmillan, 1991. 
• Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 1986. 

Wayne Grove