How did we go from an economy based on tobacco to one based on cotton? How did slavery develop in this time period?

1. From Tobacco Road in Virginia
and the Carolinas to King Cotton
in Mississippi
Allison Barnette, NBCT

2. The Market
• When the English started settling
Virginia and the Carolinas, tobacco
became an important crop to
export from the colonies. You may
remember that by 1620, slaves were
being brought over to grow
tobacco.

3. The Process
• Growing tobacco was very tedious
and labor intensive. It started by
scratching the ground and
spreading these tiny seeds.

4. Seeds were covered with hay so they could begin to sprout.

5. The Plant Grew
• Eventually, plants would start to
sprout; but they had to be dug up
and moved so that they would have
space to grow. They needed to be
mulched to retain moisture.

6. The part of the tobacco plant that was harvested was the leaf, so they had to be
protected from bugs and cold, or anything that could compromise the leaf. All this had
to be done by hand, and different plants matured at different times.

7. Once the tobacco plant matured, the leaves were harvested.
By the way, this whole process wore out the soil, so there was a need to have more land to grow more.

8. The tobacco leaves were quite large by the time they were harvested. They were put up
in barns to hang to dry out, or cure.

9. Once the tobacco lost its chlorophyll, it turned brown and cured.

10. Finally, to market
• The large brown leaves were rolled
up tightly and put into big barrels
called hogsheads. You can see the
barrels were about four feet tall.

11. It was a heavy weight (around 1000 to 1500 pounds) to load onto ships.

12. Even though they could use the labor of indentured servants, these workers eventually
left and tried to farm their own crops. They thought that slaves from the Caribbean
were a more reliable source of labor.

13. Think of All the Labor
• Ready the soil.
• Spread the seed and mulch.
• Move the young sprouts and replant.
• Tend the leaves.
• Harvest.
• Cure.
• Pack in hogsheads.
• Move hogsheads onto wagons, and then onto ships.

14. Marketing Tobacco in the Mid-1700’s
• Colonists dealt with merchants
overseas in England called factors.
They bought the tobacco and bought
goods for the planter, often to the
point of putting the planter in debt.
So much tobacco was being grown
here in America that it drove down
the price; and thus, colonists were
either not able to buy as much from
their factors in England or couldn’t
afford what they had bought. Even
George Washington complained
about it.

15. • Add to these problems that there was a messy little war here called the
Revolution that drove the business toward other markets. Transportation
became an issue. Falling prices, diminishing markets, and a need for more
land made Americans not want to rely on tobacco so much anymore.
Growing less of the labor intensive tobacco, it would seem by the late 1700’s
that slavery might be on the way out, too…

16. …Then Came
the Cotton Gin
In 1783, the new invention all but removed
one of the steps in the process of getting a
different crop, cotton, to market. A typical
worker could only clean a pound of cotton
per day before its invention. With the gin, he
could produce around 50 pounds in a day.
This was all around the same time of the
growth of fabric mills in Europe and in the
American Northeast.

17. But the labor saver only
increased the demand for
slaves!
Now with a cheaper way to produce a
product, the right soil and climate
conditions, and the right seed for the area,
the South, and Mississippi in particular,
began producing cotton with greater profits.
So the growth of slavery went hand in hand
with the growth of cotton.
Art- Library of Congress “The First Cotton Gin”

18. The Cotton/Slavery System
Went Beyond Southern
Boundaries
• 80% of England’s raw materials for fabric
production came from slave produced
cotton.
• New England consumed 67% of the
South’s slave-produced cotton.
• Slave-produced cotton accounted for 52%
of manufacturing in the North on the eve
of the Civil War.
• http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-
americans-many-rivers-to-
cross/history/why-was-cotton-king/
Don’t forget that productions like these
demand large amounts of capital, which
usually came from Northeastern banks, and
ready buyers in mills in America and
Europe. People in the North and overseas
became wealthy from the slave-produced
cotton.

19. A Changing Population
King Cotton had helped secure Mississippi’s
place as a territory that quickly grew into a
state after the War of 1812. The population
boomed yet again after the Choctaw and
Chickasaw removal of the 1830’s.