No, I’m not talking about Seagrams. Ain’t I a little devil… Anyway, back in the 1700’s the main crop of the slave master was tobacco. It was tobacco that started the rush for cheap labor and eventually slave labor. Now don’t get me wrong, they had Toby and Jemima in the fields as far back as the late 1500’s, but it wasn’t until Col. Beauregard Ceedagal D. Massa and The Lady Idare A. Blaqgal D’utter Massa started buying up huge tracts of land in the woods to plant tobacco, that the need for free labor became paramount.
Now as good as tobacco was, there was one big draw back to it. After years of over-planting and subsequent depletion of the soil’s nutrients, the tobacco fields were becoming less productive and less profitable. I don’t care how long or bad you beat Toby and Jemima, if you was planting tobacco, your fields would sooner or later turn into a desert. The fall back crop.. cotton. Before the cotton gin, a healthy slave you had not beaten or was an old “Uncle” or “Mammy, could produce one pound of cotton in about 10 hrs. Now, a lot of the movies you see show the slaves just picking the cotton and putting it in a burlap sack, while the overseer gives him a couple of lashes from on top a horse, because if he got down from off that horse… well lets just say there no hospitals nearby and if they tried to pull him down, at least he have a chance of galloping away. When the ancestors first arrived from Africa, they were bout it, bout it. Most of your slave revolts were from first generation Africans. We learn about Nat Turner, but do you research… Papa ain’t take no mess… Eventually they stop bringing in Africans because they were too dangerous and volatile. They would smile in your face and murder you and your family while you slept.
Okay, I think I’m off topic… where was I… Oh yes… Toby or Jemima could produce one pound of cotton in about 10 hrs because they had to separate the seeds from the lint also. But with the advent of the cotton gin, one slave could pick about 1000 lbs a day without worrying about the seeds. The difference was that it took a long time to separate the seeds and the cotton gin took that part out of the equation. Now history tells us that the cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney, but in fact good ole Eli was the first to patent the gin, not create it. From “No.127 Black Inventors at the University Of Houston:”
“Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1793. Suddenly we could turn a profit on this terribly labor-intensive crop. From then until the Civil War the slave population increased to the astonishing level of 4,000,000. The grand irony of all this is that the person who provided Whitney with the key idea for his gin was himself a slave, known to us only by the name Sam. Sam’s father had solved the critical problem of removing seeds from cotton by developing a kind of comb to do the job. Whitney’s cotton gin simply mechanized this comb.”
“You could have blown me away like a feather after I heard this.” ( In my “nasty” sarcastic voice..) Anyway, after the cotton gin, the slave population grew from about half a million to over four million. D. Massa and Lady Massa was making the dough baby. Lets do the numbers… a pound of cotton was about $3.45 in today’s money. If one slave could pick 1000 pounds a day, that slave would make Massa $3045.00 a day… multiply that by six days, they didn’t work on Sundays, unless Massa say so… anyway, that’s $18,270 a week… now multiply that by a hundred slaves.. multiply that by millions of slaves and you got your reason for the Civil War.
I hear if you go down to the Filthy Klan Plantation in Cotton Pickin, Mississippi, you can hear the ghost of Col. D. Massa singing.. ” Now Lady play me close like butter play toast, From the Mississippi down to the East Coast, Black girls I mean, wife’s gone today, Ni@@rs in the field seeing Massa gets paid. It was the greatest hustle of all time and the reason for the greatest war ever fought on the American continent. I want to switch gears here and relay a story about a day in the life of a slave after the advent of the cotton gin. It is a true account from “Eye Witness To History.” It tells the story from the perspective of Frederick Olmsted, a writer from what would become “The New York Times.” It happened sometime before the Civil War. The story covers more detail than I have given you here. When you read it, remember this happened to a nameless 18 year old female slave some 170 years ago. This is the account of Frederick Olmsted on that faithful day.
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