[DiogenesLamp]

While Eli Whitney was a northerner, he would naturally have tried to create the largest market for the cotton gin where the cotton was actually grown. Slavery inexorably would have become less cost-effective than machine cultivation and harvesting.

If only he had also invented a cotton picker and planter. The world would have been very different.

If the south had succeeded in leaving the union and become self-governed nation, they could have developed options such as trade schools or armed forces training for blacks, or expatriation schemes to Africa, the Islands or South America.

It is an interesting notion to contemplate what would have happened had slavery simply died out naturally.

I expect you may be right. It is my understanding that the Southerners loved their slaves as people, and wanted them to be happy. Would their concern for the well being of former slaves have manifested as efforts to make them productive citizens? It very well might have.

We could probably look to how it played out in Northern states that gradually abolished slavery for an idea of how it might have happened in the Southern states.

Of course there may be some cultural differences that may have affected the outcome.

[Albion Wilde]

Yes, I didn’t mean to imply that Whitney invented all three phases of machinery, but that the advent of machinery for all steps in the cotton crop was inevitable at that time due to the fast-spreading Industrial Revolution.