together with a Quaker merchant by the name of Moses Brown, he built a spinning jenny from memory (Furnas 303). This meager mill would later become known as the first modern factory in America. It would also become known as the point at which the North began its economic domination of the Confederacy. Although slow to accept change, The South was not entirely unaffected by the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Another inventor by the name of Eli Whitney set out in 1793 to revolutionize the Southern cotton industry. Whitney was working as a tutor for a plantation owner in Georgia (he was also, ironically, born and raised in New England) and therefore knew the problems of harvesting cotton (Brinkley et al. 200). Until then, the arduous task of separating the seeds from the cotton before sale had been done chiefly by slave labor and was, consequently, very inefficient. Whitney developed a machine which would separate the seed from the cotton swiftly and effectively, cutting the harvesting time by more than one half ("Industrial Revolution"). This machine, which became known as the cotton gin, had profound results on the South, producing the highest uptrend the industry had ever, and would ever, see. In that decade alone cotton production figures increased by more than 2000 percent (Randall and Donald 36). Enormous amounts of business opportunities opened up, including, perhaps most importantly, the expansion of the Southern plantations. This was facilitated by the fact that a single worker could now do the same amount of work in a few hours that a group of workers had once needed a whole day to do (Brinkley et al. 201). This allowed slaves to pick much more cotton per day and therefore led most plantation owners to expand their land base. The monetary gains of the cash crop quickly took precedence over the basic necessity of the food crop, which could be gotten elsewhere. In 1791 cotton production amounted to only 4000 bales, but by 186...
