DJWSLAVERY BECAME MORE PROFITABLE AND WIDEspread in the South as inventors found more efficient ways of processing cash crops produced by slaves. In 1792, New Englander Eli Whitney, a recent Yale graduate, traveled to Georgia where he devised a machine that helped give rise to the Cotton Kingdom. Before cotton could be spun into thread and woven, seeds had to be removed from the fiber. Existing devices could remove seeds from long-staple cotton, which grew only in coastal areas. Whitney’s innovative cotton gin used coarse wire teeth to extract seeds from short-staple cotton, which could be grown inland.
Despite Whitney’s patent, others soon copied his design and developed improved cotton gins, which contributed to the rapid expansion of short-staple cotton production from Georgia and the Carolinas westward to Texas. With that came the rapid expansion of slavery. In Mississippi alone, the number of slaves increased from 32,000 in 1820 to 436,000 in 1860, or more than half the state’s population. “Cotton is king,” declared Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in 1858, and that kingdom was dependent on slavery.
Sugarcane was another product of slave labor that became more profitable as a result of innovations. A major advance was made by inventor Norbert Rillieux, who was born in New Orleans in 1806 to a free woman of color and a wealthy white entrepreneur of French descent. Rillieux was educated in France and returned in 1830 to Louisiana, where he devised his multiple-effect evaporator. This apparatus greatly improved on the traditional method of processing sugarcane that involved ladling hot juice from one boiling kettle to another until the sugar granulated. That method was dangerous for slaves who performed the task and costly for planters because it consumed large amounts of fuel. Rillieux’s energy-efficient evaporator contained vacuum pans, which lowered the boiling point of the juice, and used the steam from one pan to heat another.
After arranging with a Philadelphia firm to manufacture his apparatus, Rillieux faced the problem of selling the expensive device to planters. The financial depression of the late 1830s set sugar production back for a while, but recovery was rapid, aided by the protective sugar tariff of 1842. Enterprising planters who invested in Rillieux’s apparatus were soon producing high-quality sugar and reaping soaring profits. Judah P. Benjamin, a future Confederate secretary of war, hired Rillieux to install an evaporator at his Louisiana plantation in 1843 and stated that its output rivaled “the best double refined sugar of our northern refineries.”
Rillieux’s technique was safer than the traditional method of processing sugarcane, but like Whitney’s cotton gin, his invention profited slave owners. The multiple-effect evaporator did nothing to improve conditions for the slaves who raised the crops and whose tasks were particularly brutal on sugar plantations. The increasing dependence of white Southerners on slavery also made life difficult for free men of color like Rillieux who faced mounting hostility and discrimination as the Civil War loomed. He returned to France in the late 1850s and later went on to obtain several French patents. Rillieux was recognized posthumously as a pioneering African American inventor. DJW
MODELS OF EFFICIENCY Eli Whitney’s model of his cotton gin, (FIRST IMAGE) equipped with a hand crank to remove seeds, was given to the Smithsonian by his son in 1884. Norbert Rilleux submitted the model (SECOND IMAGE) for his improved sugar-processing method, patented in 1843.
