Can anything good come out of Oregon?
This garbage from a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, is anti-white anti-capitalism rearing its ugly head, not "historical scholarship". It's what Oswald Spengler warned us about in 1934.
In the U.S., Baptists formed a national organization, the Triennial
Convention, in 1814. Around the same time, attitudes of Baptists in the
South toward the enslavement of Africans began to harden
as the 1792 invention of the cotton gin, a machine that made it easier
to separate the cotton fibers from their seeds, made enslavement more
profitable. By the 1830s, abolitionism took firm hold among Northern
Baptists, and both they and Baptists in the South argued they were
upholding Scripture through their views on slavery.
Blaming the cotton gin for an increase of enslavement appears to be a new, and stupid, argument of the anti-white-anti-capitalist industry, advanced since about 2009, in tandem with the advent of the Obama era when hostility to capitalism began to become more widely racialized, along with everything else.
The claim, as per the Wikipedia article on the cotton gin, is that "The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton
production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million
in 1850".
But the cotton production figures cited don't match the population "production" facts:
"Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850." You are led to believe with this sleight of hand that slave population was dramatically increased by 2.5 million (357%) to accomplish that 280% production increase in cotton.
That isn't the case.
From 1830 to 1850 slave population increased by 1.2 million, from 2 million to 3.2 million, or 60%, not 357% obviously. Automation meant fewer slaves were needed, not more. The increase in slave population over the period has nothing to do with the invention of the cotton gin.
Importation of slaves to the US had been halted from 1808 by act of Congress. By 1850 fewer than 305,000 had been brought to America. Slave population increased in the US naturally through reproduction over the period, by 60%, in contrast with the free population which increased in the US by about 84% (from 10.85 million to 19.99 million) through both reproduction and immigration between 1830-1850.
You can't even make the argument that slaves were bred to serve, however aspirational that might have been for a very small minority of white race schemers of the plantation enterprise. The data shows whatever the intentions were, they didn't succeed, and slave population increased at a rate lower than the free population.
You could make the argument that the invention of the cotton gin enabled slave owners to get by much longer with fewer slave laborers*, some of whom enjoyed better working conditions as a result, thus perpetuating the economics of slavery in a situation where increased supply of that labor had been cut off, but that's not the argument they are making. They aren't smart enough to make it.
*Cotton production per slave increased from 188 pounds in 1830 to 445 pounds in 1850.
