In August, after the cotton plants had flowered and the flowers had begun to give way to cotton bolls (the seed-bearing capsule that contains the cotton fiber), all the plantations slavesmen, women, and childrenworked together to pick the crop (Figure). Missouri soil allows for the growth of upland cotton with the average bale weighing approximately five hundred pounds. This is a drop of over 5 million bales from the previous year. Right: Unloading freshly harvested cotton using a mechanical, Left: Cotton farming in Mississippi using, Joyce E. Chaplin, "Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina, 1760-1815. Georgia produced a record 2.8 million bales on 4.9 million acres in 1911. See also AGRICULTURE, COTTONSEED INDUSTRY, COTTON-COMPRESS INDUSTRY, TEXTILE INDUSTRY, FARM TENANCY, SLAVERY, ANTEBELLUM TEXAS, RECONSTRUCTION, LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXAS, PROGRESSIVE ERA, and TEXAS IN THE 1920S. Horses or mules pulled the sled through the fields to harvest the cotton. Southern planters also borrowed money from banks in northern cities, and in the southern summers, took advantage of the developments in transportation to travel to resorts at Saratoga, New York; Litchfield, Connecticut; and Newport, Rhode Island. Large production in the latter areas was obtained by extensive use of fertilizers and irrigation. Much of the corn and pork that slaves consumed came from farms in the West. The result was a large-scale exodus of the white and black cotton farmers from the south. By 1850, six mills were in operation in and around Petersburg and they employed approximately 700 female workers. The Role of the Yankee in the Old South. equivalent bales). Some southerners of the time believed that their regions reliance on a single cash crop and its use of slaves to produce it gave the South economic independence and made it immune from the effects of these changes, but this was far from the truth. By 1850, of the 3.2 million enslaved people in the country's fifteen slave states, 1.8 million were producing cotton. Seventy percent of that crop was ginned from modules, and 30 percent from trailers. https://www.tshaonline.org, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/cotton-culture, By: Some slaveholders responded to this situation by freeing slaves; far more decided to sell their excess bondsmen. Cotton Extension Program, University of Missouri Agricultural Extension, USDA NASS (used total production in pounds to determine rank), University of Missouri Extension - Southeast Missouri Crop Budgets, Cinderella of the New South: A History of the Cottonseed Industry, 1855-1955, Newspaper clippings about Cotton production in the United States, Agriculture in the Southwestern United States, Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990, Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cotton_production_in_the_United_States&oldid=1150392371, Agricultural production in the United States, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2017, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Beckert, Sven.
