Huh?
The cotton gin was invented in the 18th century, and it's what made slavery BOOM! Slaves were needed to cultivate the vast amounts of cotton that the cotton gin could process.
Methinks you've got things a bit backwards, while you're insulting others over ignorance.
@Suppresed
Methinks
And that is where you started going wrong.
The Cotton Gin greatly reduced the number of workers/slaves needed to pick and process cotton. The first one was build around 1800,but the exact date is not nailed down.
Guess what was first built in 1812? The first tractor. Yeah,it was a steam-powered dangerous monstrosity,but a blind man could see where slavery was going. The first one was produced in 1812,and by 1839 a mobile tractor was on the market. VERY crude and under-powered by today's standards,but how many horses pulling plows would it take to plow as many furrows in one day as the steam-powered tractor? And you have to know that on the first day it hit the fields pulling a plow,people started trying to figure out how to make it plant crops,too.This was 22 years BEFORE the Civil War began.
Slavery was on the way out,and anybody that bothered to look could see it. Machines might cost more to buy than slaves,but they don't get sick and they don't need overseers,and you don't have to provide them with food,clothing,shelter,and medical care. Putting moral issues aside,it just didn't make financial sense to keep buying and working slaves once mechanical planters and pickers hit the fields. How many slaves do you think it would take to do the same amount of work in a 12 hour day in 1837 as a steam-powered tractor pulling a plow,followed by one pulling a planter?
Ever heard of a little company named John Deere? Formed in 1837 to make steel plow blades for farming,by 1853 the company was manufacturing a variety of farm equipment products in addition to plows, including wagons, corn planters, and cultivators. By 1912 they were making 4wd gasoline powered tractors,but they were by far not the first. As noted above,tractors started being manufactured and sold in 1837. Remind me again when The War of Northern Aggression began. While you are looking this up,look up what types of mechanical farm machinery was in production at that time.
Granted,small farmers couldn't afford tractors,Cotton Gins,planters,etc,etc,etc,but they couldn't afford slaves,either. I don't know how accurate this figure is,but I have read that a healthy young black male slave could sell for $3,000 in 1860 money. That was a HELL of a lot of money in 1860. In fact,there were already a lot of freed slaves in the south in 1860. Not that it benefited them much. For the most part they had no education or work experience that wasn't related to farm work,and being freed slaves they pretty much had to either head north or live close to where they had been slaves so they could be hired as seasonal workers when the crops needed to be planted or picked. Like with the poor whites at the time,it was pretty much a hand to mouth existence.