time Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin. Though his original intention was to ease the slaves tasks, the cotton gin did exactly the opposite. Cotton was as profitable than ever, were as before it would take a slave a day to remove the seeds from a pound of cotton it now took maybe a couple minutes. Slaves were worked harder and harder and were as vital of an element to the plantation as cotton itself.Roughly about the late 1850s, with the pressure from the North mounting, and slavery as profitable as it was, the South found itself between a rock and a hard place. Doing the right thing, and freeing the slaves, would prove disastrous for its booming agrarian economy, so it would simply have to change its stance on slavery. It was no longer a necessary evil, as proved by abolitionist, but a positive good and their right. Southerners now turned to the Constitution and earlier legislation, the three-fifths Compromise, to defend their new idea. As agreed to in the Three-fifths Compromise, slaves were three-fifths property, and as property it was protected by the fifth amendment, in the Constitution, (... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property ... without just compensation.). So within about 30 years the Souths defense for slavery had evolved. At first they calmed anti-slavery people by telling them stories of feeble-minded slaves who would be lost without their white master; some went as far as to get Bible verses and twist them to mean slavery was practically created by God. Then when confronted by abolitionist with stronger arguments they were forced to take up the powerful law of the land to defend themselves and their actions because at a time farming was main source of income, and without slaves there was no farming. ...
