Eli Whitney's cotton gin revived the fading institution of slavery by making cotton farming practical. The fact is that the demand for and price of slaves boomed because of the cotton gin.
And John Deere's self-cleaning steel plow had much more effect in breaking up prairie sod in the upper midwest than it did in the slave belt.
If you're speaking of mechanization in general, cotton farming wasn't mechanized until the 1940s, when the first practical cotton harvester was developed. That combined with advances in herbicides, which reduced the amount of hand "chopping" of cotton fields, to reduce the amount of manual labor cotton production required. Not coincidentally, this is when sharecropping, the southern agricultural labor system that replaced slavery with debt peonage, died off.
This is correct. Slavery was waning prior to the development of the Cotton Gin. It is the Cotton Gin that made it highly profitable.
If you're speaking of mechanization in general, cotton farming wasn't mechanized until the 1940s, when the first practical cotton harvester was developed.
It is possible that this may have been developed earlier had it not been for the destruction of the Civil War, but that is of course speculative. Once Cotton Harvesting machines became available, slavery would no longer have been profitable anyways. The surest way to kill a business model is to take away it's profitability.
Slavery was doomed eventually, but it might have lingered on another 80 years but for the consequences of the war.
You forgot pesticides.
I’m from Alabama. You left out The Boll Weevil.
That just about killed cotton farming for dozens of years, until strong but effective pesticides were created.
You still can’t grow cotton here without treating it for boll weevils. Talk about invasive government, they even have armed ag agents and some in planes looking for non-registered plots.