KING COTTON Mankind has been using cotton for fabric and clothing for thousands of years, and even today cotton is the natural fiber most commonly used in clothing. Cotton has had an enormous impact on life in regions throughout the world, but perhaps nowhere more than the American South.
Cotton was first planted in Georgia in Trustees Garden, Savannah in 1733 with seeds from England. Â Although the crop had already been growing in Florida and Virginia, In 1778, Georgia became the first state to produce cotton for commercial purposes.
But in America’s early days, cotton was neither widespread nor popular. It was simply too expensive to produce, especially to separate the seeds from the cotton fiber. A Massachusetts schoolteacher named Eli Whitney, however, would revolutionize the industry and change the course of history in the South. He invented the cotton gin in 1793, while visiting Georgia. The cotton ‘gin’, short for ‘engine,’ made production immensely more efficient; Whitney claimed it could do the work of fifty men. The invention was seen to be so important to the United States economy that the patent was signed by George Washington himself.
But Whitney was not the only man inventing with cotton in mind. In 1796, Hodges Holmes, a Savannah native, obtained a patent for a gin that operated with saws rather than spikes. Holmes’s gin improved upon a critical flaw in Whitney’s design—Whitney’s gin crushed the cottonseeds, releasing their oil and staining the lint. Holmes’s gin also did not require the operator to stop and remove the seeds, so the process was continuous.
Many believe that history has given too much credit to Eli Whitney, and not enough to Holmes and other inventors. Although Whitney was a graduate of the Yale School of Law, and Hodges had little formal education, the two men would go on to battle in court over Whitney’s alleged attempts to take credit for Hodges’s improvements. Each man seems to have been a genius in his own right.
The forced removal of the Creek and Cherokee Indians from Georgia at the beginning of the nineteenth century cleared the way for some of the South’s most productive farmland to be used. The Civil War, however, nearly wiped out the cotton industry in Georgia. Not only did the Union Army blockade Southern ports, the Confederate government also cut exports in an attempt to persuade the British to recognize the Confederacy.
When the war ended in 1865 growers were challenged to find funding, seeds, workers, and equipment to begin production again. The production of cotton still required vast labor forces, and Southern farmers transitioned from the plantation system to sharecropping. Georgia was quick to recover. Fifteen years after the war ended, the state reached its first million-bale harvest of cotton. A large part of cotton’s speedy comeback was due to the newfound demand for denim. Levi Strauss was the first to produce denim jeans, which miners used for work clothes during the California Gold Rush.
It wasn’t until the 1950’s that reliable cotton harvesting equipment came to the South; before this time, the machinery had been too clumsy to pick the cotton without shredding. Cotton is still a major US export, and a large portion of the world’s annual production comes from the United States, along with places like China, India, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Georgia is still one of the nation’s top producers, and “White Gold” continues to play a crucial role in the state’s economy and culture.