A cotton gin – meaning "cotton engine" – is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as calico, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. The separated seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil.
A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The crops that are grown include cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, opium, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, fruits, rubber trees and forest trees. Protectionist policies and natural comparative advantage have sometimes contributed to determining where plantations are located.
Agriculture is a major industry in the United States, which is a net exporter of food. As of the 2017 census of agriculture, there were 2.04 million farms, covering an area of 900 million acres (1,400,000 sq mi), an average of 441 acres per farm.
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
Holing cane was a process by which slave labor gangs planted sugar cane on plantations.
Wage labour, usually referred to as paid work, paid employment, or paid labour, refers to the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer in which the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined.
In the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period spanned the end of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. The Antebellum South was characterized by the use of slavery and the culture it fostered. As the era proceeded, Southern intellectuals and leaders gradually shifted from defending slavery as an embarrassing and temporary system, to a full-on defense of slavery as a positive good, and harshly criticized the budding abolitionist movement. As the country expanded westward, slavery's propagation became a major issue in national politics, eventually boiling over into the Civil War. In the years that followed, this period was romanticized by historical revisionists to protect three central, yet flawed, assertions: that the Confederate cause was heroic, that enslaved people were happy and satisfied, and that slavery was not the central cause of the war. This phenomenon has continued to influence racism, gender roles and religious attitudes in the South, and to a lesser extent the rest of the country, to the present day.
The domestic slave trade, also known as the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the term for the domestic trade of enslaved people within the United States that reallocated slaves across states during the antebellum period. It was most significant in the early to mid-19th century, when historians estimate one million slaves were taken in a forced migration from the Upper South: Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia, to the territories and newly admitted states of the Deep South and the West Territories: Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
Engenho is a colonial-era Portuguese term for a sugar cane mill and the associated facilities. In Spanish-speaking countries such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, they are called ingenios. Both words mean engine. The word engenho usually only referred to the mill, but it could also describe the area as a whole including land, a mill, the people who farmed and who had a knowledge of sugar production, and a crop of sugar cane. A large estate was required because of the massive amount of labor needed to yield refined sugar, molasses, or rum from raw sugar cane. These estates were prevalent in Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and other countries in the Caribbean. Today, Brazil is still one of the world's major producers of sugar.
An industrial slave is a type of slave who typically worked in an industrial setting. These slaves often had work that was more dangerous than agricultural slaves.
Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital is a treatise of critique of political economy first published on 14 September 1867 by German philosopher and sociologist Karl Marx. The product of a decade of research and redrafting, the book applies class analysis to capitalism focusing upon production processes, making the capitalist mode of production historically specific. Particularly, the sources and forms of surplus value in the context of explaining the dynamics of capital accumulation characterizing economic development over a long period of time are key themes developed analytically throughout the work.
Pitts' Folly is a historic antebellum Greek Revival residence located in Uniontown, Alabama. The house was built by Philip Henry Pitts as his main house. It was designed by architect B. F. Parsons, who also designed the nearby Perry County Courthouse in Marion. Many local legends detail how the house gained its name, but they all center on the people of Uniontown believing it to be folly, or foolishness, that Pitts was building such a large house.
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South is a non-fiction book about slavery published in 1956, by academic Kenneth M. Stampp of the University of California, Berkeley and other universities. The book describes and analyzes multiple facets of slavery in the American South from the 17th through the mid-19th century, including demographics, lives of slaves and slaveholders, the Southern economy and labor systems, the Northern and abolitionist response, slave trading, and political issues of the time.
Manual labour or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. It is most literally work done with the hands and, by figurative extension, it is work done with any of the muscles and bones of the body. For most of human prehistory and history, manual labour and its close cousin, animal labour, have been the primary ways that physical work has been accomplished. Mechanisation and automation, which reduce the need for human and animal labour in production, have existed for centuries, but it was only starting in the 18th and 19th centuries that they began to significantly expand and to change human culture. To be implemented, they require that sufficient technology exist and that its capital costs be justified by the amount of future wages that they will obviate. Semi-automation is an alternative to worker displacement that combines human labour, automation, and computerization to leverage the advantages of both man and machine.
The task system is a system of labor under slavery characteristic in the Americas. It is usually regarded as less brutal than other forms of slave labor. The other form, known as the gang system, was harsher. Under this system, each slave is assigned a specific task to complete for the day. After that task is finished, the slave is then free to do as he or she wishes with the remaining time. The gang systems forced the slaves to work until the owner said they were finished and allowed them almost no freedom. Whether plantation owners organized their slaves on the task or gang system had much to do with the type of crops they harvested. Tobacco and sugar cultivation was organized into gangs since those crops required considerable processing and supervision. Coffee, rice, and pimento were comparatively hardier plants where extensive supervision was unnecessary, leading planters to favor the task system on their plantations.
Liberty Hill in La Grange, Georgia, about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) west of the Chattahoochee River in Troup County, is a Greek Revival style plantation house built in the 1830s or 1840s. The original cotton plantation owner, John T. Boykin, bought the piece of land the house is on in 1836. The house with its current 150 acres (61 ha) property, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Slave breeding in the United States was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of enslaved people to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Tobacco cultivation and exports formed an essential component of the American colonial economy. During the Civil War, they were distinct from other cash crops in terms of agricultural demands, trade, slave labor, and plantation culture. Many influential American revolutionaries, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, owned tobacco plantations, and were financially devastated by debt to British tobacco merchants shortly before the American Revolution.
A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Southern plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
The Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book is a best-selling and pioneering guide to farm accounting in the antebellum cotton-producing regions of the United States. It was first published in 1847 or 1848 by Thomas Affleck (1812-1868), a Scottish immigrant and owner of the Glenblythe Plantation in Gay Hill, Washington County, Texas. The book contains a detailed system, including blank tables to be filled in, that allowed plantation owners to track the efficiency of their production. It also includes essays on various aspects of plantation management, such as the proper care and discipline of slaves.
