History of Cotton after 1500

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Cotton pickers in the 1800s AD

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 AD made it possible for farmers to produce cotton cheaply enough so cotton was now the cheapest kind of cloth. Tens of thousands of black people worked hard as slaves in South Carolina and Georgia to plant and pick enough cotton for everybody to wear. Farmers sold a lot of the cotton to settlers in New York and other northern states, and a lot of it also to people in England, who made it into cloth there.

To get more and more land to grow more cotton, European and African settlers moved into Alabama and Mississippi, pushing out or killing the Mississippian people who were living there. Planting cotton wore out the land, so cotton farmers were always looking for new land further west - in Louisiana, then Texas, and Arkansas. Some of these cotton farmers were rich men and women who owned many slaves, but others were poor families who just grew enough cotton to buy food for themselves.

Cotton picking machine

After the Civil War in the 1860s, most of the black people who had been working picking cotton stayed on in the South and picked cotton just the way they had before, only now as share-croppers instead of as slaves. But in the 1950s, people invented motorized machines that could pick the cotton. These machines used gasoline motors. But oil and gas also helped cotton farmers out in a lot of other ways about the same time. Farmers used motors to run cotton gins.

They used nitrogen fertilizers made from oil to keep the soil good for growing cotton. And they used gas-powered ships to send cotton all over the world. Clothes got much cheaper. Today, cotton is the cheapest kind of clothing except for polyester, and the United States produces most of the world's cotton. Underwear, socks, jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies are made of cotton. But as gas and oil become more expensive, so will cotton and polyester clothing.