ABSTRACT
The association between cotton and slavery is embedded deep in US history and folk memory. The concept and popular images of ‘the South’ are so entangled with cotton – and slavery – that they tend to be linked automatically: cotton means slavery. But as with other slave-grown produce, the story of cotton has an unusual historical trajectory. Cotton had been grown in various New World settlements long before Sea Island cotton was transplanted from the Bahamas to mainland America during the American Revolution. However, it was the short-staple variety of cotton that became the basis of the American cotton revolution. This followed the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin after 1793, allowing cultivation in upland and inland locations, shifting cotton away from its old coastal locations. By 1800, this type of cotton had begun to replace tobacco in upcountry Georgia. There, it was grown by slave labour, the slaves having migrated with white settlers moving from the old slave regions of Virginia and South Carolina. The indigenous people were moved out, and slaves were moved in, along what became an internal US slave-trading route. Slaves from the old slaveowning east began cultivation of cotton in newly settled frontier regions.
