How Did Eli Whitney Influence Politics

In discussions of political relevance and significance, oftentimes one automatically thinks of historical characters actively engaging in the political spectrum––be it senators, representatives, governors or presidents. As such, in many instances very influential individuals are overlooked or forgotten. Although they are not contemporaries of one another, both Eli Whitney and Martin Luther King––two non-politicians––greatly influenced the politics of our country. Despite their political influence, each character achieved this influence in different ways. Eli Whitney influenced the workings of our nation through his achievements, specifically the invention of the cotton gin. After graduating from Yale in the late 1700s, Eli Whitney moved to Georgia and took up a job as a tutor to pay off his student debt. After failing as a tutor, Whitney was referred to his landlady by a friend as a “person of both mechanical ability and social skills” (Wren and Greenwood). Whitney’s landlady, a woman by the name of Catherine Greene, exploited his skills and asked him to devise a machine that could pick apart the cotton fibers …show more content…
As previously stated, Whitney set the wheel of slavery turning faster and faster with his production of his cotton gin. Since the gin stimulated and accelerated the growth of slavery in the South, it is not difficult to conclude that, inadvertently, Whitney helped pave a path that promoted the marginalization of the African American community in the United States for years. It is absurd to think that Whitney is solely to blame for the continuing practice of slavery in the Antebellum South; however, it does not require a stretch of the imagination for one to see that his actions were one of the contributing factors to the degradation and exploitation of the African American community that lasted for generation after Whitney’s