The video explores the profound historical impact of cotton on America's economy, specifically how it was intertwined with slavery. The cotton industry, crucial to the U.S economy, was primarily driven by the labor of enslaved African Americans. This labor underpinned the wealth of both Southern plantations and Northern ventures, extending to global economic networks dependent on slave-produced cotton.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 intensified these dynamics, dramatically increasing cotton production and the demand for enslaved labor. By the time of the Civil War, the U.S emerged as a leading cotton producer largely due to the exploitation of enslaved workers. The economic benefits of cotton extended beyond the South to the Northern U.S, England, and France, highlighting a complex global dependency on slave labor.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. lucrative [ˈluːkrətɪv] - (adjective) - producing a great deal of profit; profitable. - Synonyms: (profitable, gainful, remunerative)

But it's easy to forget that part of the reason that cotton was so lucrative in early America was because it was harvested with the labor of enslaved people.

2. incentivized [ɪnˈsɛntɪvaɪzd] - (verb) - motivated or encouraged someone to do something, especially to work harder or to be more productive. - Synonyms: (motivated, encouraged, propelled)

...incentivized the use of enslaved labor to satisfy the enormous international demand for cotton.

3. exploitation [ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. - Synonyms: (utilization, misuse, oppression)

...many white people in the northern United States gained their fortunes through the exploitation of enslaved workers in the South.

4. commodity [kəˈmɒdɪti] - (noun) - a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold. - Synonyms: (product, material, article)

According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, cotton was the first mass consumer commodity.

5. backbreaking [ˈbækˌbreɪkɪŋ] - (adjective) - physically demanding, involving significant effort and exertion. - Synonyms: (grueling, arduous, strenuous)

Enslaved labor and cotton went hand in hand to produce profit and the work, it was more than just backbreaking.

6. autobiography [ˌɔːtəˈbaɪəɡrəfi] - (noun) - an account of a person's life written by that person. - Synonyms: (memoir, life story, personal history)

He said in his 1837 autobiography, Slavery in the United States, Surely, if anything, can justify a man in taking his life into his own hands and terminating his existence.

7. laborious [ləˈbɔːrɪəs] - (adjective) - requiring considerable time and effort. - Synonyms: (hard, strenuous, demanding)

Before 1793, separating the sticky seeds from cotton was a laborious task.

8. intergenerational [ˌɪntərˌdʒɛnəˈreɪʃənəl] - (adjective) - occurring between or involving different generations, usually related to knowledge, wealth, or conditions passed down. - Synonyms: (multigenerational, cross-generational)

The implications of this are profound. Let's step back and consider that intergenerational chattel slavery in the United States.

9. accumulated [əˈkjuːmjʊleɪtɪd] - (adjective) - collected over a period of time; increased in quantity, degree, or intensity. - Synonyms: (gathered, amassed, compiled)

This directly impacts generational wealth in the United States today. If your family was able to accrue income equity and mobility by owning land that produced cotton, or any other crop for that matter, and then pass it down across generations, it would quite naturally leave your descendants in a more economically secure position.

10. chattel [ˈtʃætəl] - (noun) - a personal possession; in historical context, refers to enslaved people viewed as property. - Synonyms: (property, asset, holding)

Let's step back and consider that intergenerational chattel slavery in the United States.

The Rise of Cotton - Crash Course Black American History #13

Hi, my name's Clint Smith, and this is Crash Course Black American History.

So if you look at the tag on the shirt that you're wearing, you'll probably find that at least a portion of it is made of cotton. I mean, cotton is everywhere. It's in our shirts, in our pants, in curtains and blankets and so many other things that we don't even realize. But even though that cotton on your back was meant to keep you comfortable, the historical reality of the United States is that the cotton industry was built on the backs of black folks.

A lot of cotton is grown in the hot and humid climate of the southern United States. And a lot of this country's wealth was built on the cotton trade. But it's easy to forget that part of the reason that cotton was so lucrative in early America was because it was harvested with the labor of enslaved people. And even though the dirty work of the cotton industry took place mainly in the southern states, many white people in the northern United States gained their fortunes through the exploitation of enslaved workers in the South.

And the reason that cotton became such a central economic pillar was not just because of what was happening in the US but because of an entire global financial network that, whether they sanctioned the use of slavery themselves or not, incentivized the use of enslaved labor to satisfy the enormous international demand for cotton.

It's time we learn about how cotton became king. Let's start the show. By the time of the Civil War, the United States was wealthy. I'm talking Scrooge McDuck swimming in golden coins. Rich. It had become one of the major slave trading capitals of the world and a major exporter of cotton.

According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, cotton was the first mass consumer commodity. Which is just a fancy way of saying that everybody in the world wanted it. They wanted it for their clothes, for their blankets, for their rugs, for their socks. I mean, demand across the globe was exploding. The cotton industry was so powerful that it not only grew the US Economy, but many economies in Europe as well. But most nations couldn't compete with the United States production level.

According to historian Edward Baptist, the North American interior had thousands of acres of possible cotton fields, thousands for each one in the Caribbean. And in order to develop all of this land, there was a greater need for laborers to work the cotton plantations of the south and Mid Atlantic United States. And as had become standard practice in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries, the plan was for most of these laborers to be enslaved black people.

Enslaved labor and cotton went hand in hand to produce profit and the work, it was more than just backbreaking. It was torture. Charles Ball, a black man and author who escaped slavery, wrote that the brutality of the cotton industry was enough to make an individual contemplate taking their own life. He said in his 1837 autobiography, Slavery in the United States, Surely, if anything, can justify a man in taking his life into his own hands and terminating his existence. No one can attach blame to the slaves on many of the cotton plantations of the south when they cut short their breath and the agonies of the present being by a single stroke, what is life worth amidst hunger, nakedness and excessive toil under the continually uplifted lash?

It really doesn't get more clear than that. And in 1793, the cotton gin arrived, and it transformed the cotton industry, the global economy, and in horrific ways, the lives of enslaved people.

The cotton gin significantly ramped up cotton production in the United States, especially in South Carolina and Georgia. Let's check that out in the thought bubble.

Before 1793, separating the sticky seeds from cotton was a laborious task. Then the mechanical cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney made the process much faster and easier than it had ever been. What would happen is that cotton would be threaded through a wooden drum filled with hooks that caught hold of the fibers and pulled them through a mesh. The holes in that mesh were too small to allow the seeds through, but the cotton fibers themselves were easily pulled through. While some larger gins would later be powered by horses and even steam engines, Whitney used a smaller version. Whitney's hand cranked machine could remove the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in a single day.

What this meant was that planters needed a way to grow and pick more cotton to keep up with the new accelerated pace of processing. And at the same time, market conditions in Europe meant cotton was more desirable than ever. What this meant was that planters needed even more labor from even more enslaved workers than they did before. Demand for other industrial cotton machinery grew as well, like new machines for spinning cotton or steamboats to transport massive bales of it.

This drastically changed the American economic landscape. By the 1850s, Cotton provided 3/5 of American exports, and the yield of raw cotton doubled every decade after 1800, by some estimates, the United States supplied 3/4 of the global supply of cotton by the start of the Civil War. If cotton wasn't king before, it certainly was now.

Thanks, thought bubble. The economic impact of the cotton industry on the United States and the enslaved people whose labor sustained it is very clear. Again.

Historian Edward Baptist writes, all told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million odd slaves. 6% of the total US population who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery's frontier.

And again, it wasn't just the United States. It was the world. Most of the Western world's economies benefited from the cotton industry.

Historian Gene Dattle argues that cotton produced by enslaved people was the driving force for territorial expansion in the old Southwest and fostered trade between Europe and the United States. Major northern cities like New York City needed raw cotton for their own industries. New England was also seriously dependent on raw cotton. For the textile revolution. New England Mills consumed 283.7 million pounds of cotton, or 67% of the cotton used by US mills in 1860.

So any notion that the north wasn't intimately involved in slavery is something that we should immediately toss out the window abroad. Countries like Britain and France also depended on raw cotton. According to Gene Daddle, Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, relied on slave produced cotton for over 80% of its essential industrial raw material. English textile mills accounted for 40% of Britain's exports. One fifth of Britain's 22 million people were directly or indirectly involved with cotton textiles.

And it didn't stop there. One of the main causes of the Civil War was cotton and the status of the enslaved laborers who produced that cotton. Southern slaveholders were so financially attached to the cotton industry that they were willing to go to war over it. And at the end of the war, cotton was one of the bargaining tools that the south used to assure that they would still have a place and political power in the Union.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll get to the Civil War soon. Now let's do some deeper thinking about the economic implications of slavery in 1860. In large part tied to the explosion of the cotton industry. The 4 million enslaved people in the United States were worth more than all of the railroads and factories in the nation combined. Those enslaved workers were worth more than all of the manufacturing in the United States.

So black people's labor has played an enormous role in America's ascent as a global economic superpower. But enslaved people themselves didn't get to reap the benefits of the economic explosion they created. The vast majority of black folks were not allowed to own any property, and if they did, it could be seized from them at any moment without them being able to do much of anything about it.

Even when slavery was abolished, the sharecropping system in the south worked in similar ways, plunging black Americans and their families into devastating debt while they owned nothing of their own. The implications of this are profound.

Let's step back and consider that intergenerational chattel slavery in the United States, in which black people rarely own their own land, lasted for 250 years before ending, technically at least, in 1865. Let's then consider that sharecropping, in which enormous numbers of black people continue to not own their own land, lasted well into the 1950s and arguably later. This directly impacts generational wealth in the United States today.

If your family was able to accrue income equity and mobility by owning land that produced cotton, or any other crop for that matter, and then pass it down across generations, it would quite naturally leave your descendants in a more economically secure position than those who came before them.

But black folks, despite working the land, cultivating the land, and picking the cotton and crops that grew on the land, for the most part, didn't have any opportunity to reap the financial benefits of that land.

What this did was leave many black families well after slavery ended and into the 20th century with little, if anything to pass down to their children, something that shapes the sort of opportunities that their descendants would or would not have. And this gap between white and black people is compounded decade after decade after decade, until it's no longer a gap in wealth, it's a gulf.

Cotton was the United States biggest export for more than a century. That's more than 100 years of wealth creation and industry that black Americans not only carried on their backs, but were designated to never profit from. I mean, calling it a head start for white people doesn't even accurately capture it.

It wasn't just a head start. It was like you were running while the person you're racing against had chains on their feet and death threats in their ears.

So when we talk about creating a more equitable nation, part of what we have to think about is how to account for and make amends for what was done to people and what was kept from people for generations. The question remains, how can we compensate those who this country purposefully left behind? Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time. Crash Course is made with the help of all these nice people. And our animation team is Thought Cafe. Crash Course is a complex leap production.

Education, History, Economics, Cotton Industry, Slavery, Civil War, Crashcourse