The cotton gin was an innovation that made a lot of slave labor obsolete. Beto doesn’t know what a cotton gin is. He’s a moron.
That comparison is insulting to morons.
Sort of. Sort of not. It was harder to get the seeds out before the cotton gin, so cotton was more expensive and less competitive. After the cotton gin, cotton was cheaper and cotton products were easier to buy. Combine that with all the new lands opening up, and cotton plantations became a bigger business than they would otherwise have been. There was more support for slavery and more opposition to emancipation and very likely more slaves than you would have had if cotton goods had remained more of a specialty product. The cotton gin didn't free workers from slavery, it just meant that slave labor could be deployed differently - with more profit to the slaveowner and more incentive to grow cotton and own slaves.