Ah, you got the joke. Glad someone did. :)
Everybody believed it would just fade away. So they simply let the sleeping dog lie, on the theory he would just die in his sleep.
It would have but for Massachusetts Yankee Eli Whitney. He flipped the profitability equation.
Had he not made it so economically viable, it would likely have succumbed to the social and moral forces that were sweeping it away elsewhere.
Agreed.
See, we can agree on things. :)
To be fair, Whitney wasn’t trying to rescue slavery. In fact, if I remember correctly, he thought his invention would help end slavery because it so greatly reduced the amount of labor needed to clean seeds out of cotton.
Best laid plans and all that...