Overview
As the cotton industry exploded into existence, a need for more laborers arose, and was met with the solution of a massive increase in slaves. The once dying out practice was quickly revived into something larger than ever before.
- From the time the cotton gin was invented, until 1808, over 80,000 Africans were imported as slaves (Shur).
- Over 80 thousand Africans were imported to America as slaves from the time the cotton gin was invented, until the Act of 1807, in which the importation of foreign slaves was criminalized.
- With foreign trade not legal, the price of domestic slaves increased drastically.
- In the fifteen years after the gin was invented, the price of a top notch slave doubled from 600 dollars.
- Prices only continued to go up, increasing to several thousand dollars for a high quality slave in the years leading up to the civil war.
- The ratio of slaves to Americans in the South always hovered at around one slave for every three Americans, but from 1790 to 1860, the amount of slaves increased from 6 hundred thousand, to 4 million.
- Unfortunately the productivity of the cotton industry and the slaves that accompanied it, brought considerable tension between the Southern slave states and the free Northern states.