South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond famously wrote in March of 1858 to fellow Senator William H. Seward of New York, “No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.” Cotton was chief to the South’s economy, and was spearheaded by 1793’s invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, allowing for a single worker to clean fifty times more cotton than previously possible. Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century philosopher, said, “The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.” Both men were correct in recognizing the power of technology, specifically concerning the Civil War. The cotton gin enabled the South
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While the average slave could clean only a single pound of cotton per day, the gin facilitated the cleaning in excess of 50 pounds per day. As one might imagine, this made it dramatically faster and less expensive to turn picked cotton into textile-ready cotton, and between 1800 and 1860, cotton production soared from 156,000 bales to 4,000,000 bales, credit which is applied to Whitney. James Hammond said of the South, “I believe that if she was able to plant but half her cotton, for three years to come, it would be an immense advantage to her.” This was accurate, as Great Britain, the world’s most powerful country at the time, had nearly four of its twenty-one million total population reliant on cotton for cotton textile manufacturing. The price of cotton by 1860 had risen to 10 cents per pound, and with a bale weighing 400-500 pounds each, resulting in over $4 million worth of total exports from the South, worth roughly $120 million after adjusting for inflation. However, it was not only the funding of the war that the cotton gin enabled. Due to the explosion of cotton as a cash crop, Southern racism and its white-supremacy-modeled social system was strengthened. Confederate President Jefferson Davis said in 1850, “... [the slaves] in useful employment, restrained from the vicious indulgences to …show more content…
On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. Morse transmitted the legendary message, “What hath God wrought?” from Washington to Baltimore, using the telegraph in the first recorded instance of a successfully transmitted electronic message. Consequently, Lincoln became the first President to communicate instantly with his officers on the battlefield, replacing a process which took several days previously. The far-reaching implications of this communication technology absolutely cannot be withheld. Lincoln was able to make critical decisions on the spot and quickly relay them back to commanding officers, preserving the opportunity, which would have long vanished without a rapid means of communication. One such example of this is Lincoln’s message to a colonel: “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago?” The telegraph, able to transmit and receive an instantaneous response, enabling the fighting of the Civil War. Furthermore, it also brought to rise Lincoln’s presidency, who was at the time a little-known Representative from Illinois. In the fall of 1859, Henry Ward Beecher, a renowned abolitionist, invited Lincoln to give a lecture at his Brooklyn church. Said Beecher of Lincoln’s invitation, “I told Mr. Lincoln I thought it would help open the way to the Presidency…” Beecher was living in New York, over 1000 miles from
While the average slave could clean only a single pound of cotton per day, the gin facilitated the cleaning in excess of 50 pounds per day. As one might imagine, this made it dramatically faster and less expensive to turn picked cotton into textile-ready cotton, and between 1800 and 1860, cotton production soared from 156,000 bales to 4,000,000 bales, credit which is applied to Whitney. James Hammond said of the South, “I believe that if she was able to plant but half her cotton, for three years to come, it would be an immense advantage to her.” This was accurate, as Great Britain, the world’s most powerful country at the time, had nearly four of its twenty-one million total population reliant on cotton for cotton textile manufacturing. The price of cotton by 1860 had risen to 10 cents per pound, and with a bale weighing 400-500 pounds each, resulting in over $4 million worth of total exports from the South, worth roughly $120 million after adjusting for inflation. However, it was not only the funding of the war that the cotton gin enabled. Due to the explosion of cotton as a cash crop, Southern racism and its white-supremacy-modeled social system was strengthened. Confederate President Jefferson Davis said in 1850, “... [the slaves] in useful employment, restrained from the vicious indulgences to …show more content…
On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. Morse transmitted the legendary message, “What hath God wrought?” from Washington to Baltimore, using the telegraph in the first recorded instance of a successfully transmitted electronic message. Consequently, Lincoln became the first President to communicate instantly with his officers on the battlefield, replacing a process which took several days previously. The far-reaching implications of this communication technology absolutely cannot be withheld. Lincoln was able to make critical decisions on the spot and quickly relay them back to commanding officers, preserving the opportunity, which would have long vanished without a rapid means of communication. One such example of this is Lincoln’s message to a colonel: “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago?” The telegraph, able to transmit and receive an instantaneous response, enabling the fighting of the Civil War. Furthermore, it also brought to rise Lincoln’s presidency, who was at the time a little-known Representative from Illinois. In the fall of 1859, Henry Ward Beecher, a renowned abolitionist, invited Lincoln to give a lecture at his Brooklyn church. Said Beecher of Lincoln’s invitation, “I told Mr. Lincoln I thought it would help open the way to the Presidency…” Beecher was living in New York, over 1000 miles from