The cotton gin was designed to reduce labor but actually caused slavery to expand rapidly.

In 1793, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that used a rotating cylinder with wire teeth to pull cotton fibers through a screen while leaving seeds behind. Before this invention, a single person could only clean about one pound of short-staple cotton per day. The gin allowed a single worker to process up to 50 pounds daily, making large-scale production economically viable for the first time.This technological leap transformed the American South into the world’s leading cotton producer. By the mid-19th century, the United States was providing 75 percent of the world’s cotton, largely fueled by the demand from British textile mills during the Industrial Revolution. This economic boom created an insatiable need for more land, leading to the forced removal of indigenous peoples and the expansion of the plantation system into the 'Deep South.'The demographic impact was devastating. In 1790, there were approximately 700,000 enslaved people in the United States. By 1860, that number had surged to nearly 4 million. Historians from institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Archives note that the cotton gin effectively tethered the Southern economy to slavery for decades. It turned a dying institution into a multibillion-dollar industry that dominated American politics until the Civil War.