In 1793, the cotton gin was introduced in the South. The invention greatly increased cotton production. Cotton moved from being less than 5 percent of all U.S. exports in 1790, to 32 percent in 1820, to 51.6 percent in 1840, and by 1860 to over 57.5 percent, in the United States. In other words, cotton production in the South increased from only 3,135 bales a year in 1790 to 3,841,000 (3. 8 million) bales a year in 1860.



The price of slaves also rose, reflecting their importance to the cotton­ producing South, from an average price of $600 per slave to $1,800 per slave. With the use of the gin, the United States became the largest producer and the largest exporter of cotton in the world. The invention also was largely responsible for reviving the institution of slavery in the South. With the declining market in Europe for tobacco, the institution had been dying. In fact, without the cotton gin, slavery might have proved unprofitable and been abandoned. Indeed, the War between the States might never have been fought. However, as cotton became an integral part of England's textile industry and production continued to increase in the South from 1820 to 1860, so did the de­ mand for slaves. 

Cotton helped to make the South rich, to institutionalize slavery, and to develop a social structure that would separate the North from the South, even today. The Cotton Kingdom, or Black Belt, as it came to be known, ran from Virginia through the coastal plains of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and eastern Texas and up the Mississippi River Valley into eastern Arkansas and Missouri and western Kentucky and Tennessee. As a result of the rich soil of the coastal plains and the Mississippi River Valley, slaveholders and their slaves from the upper South and south Atlantic states rapidly moved west and south into these areas to grow cotton.