"It was work hard, git beatins and half fed ... . The times I hated most was pickin' cotton when the frost was on the bolls. My hands git sore and crack open and bleed."--Mary Reynolds, Slave Narrative from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
One of the first images of slavery that leaps into everyone's mind is the scene of slaves stooped over, picking cotton, and hauling huge cotton-stuffed bags behind them. Unlike many first reactions, this one is correct. At the height of the plantation system in 1850, when cotton had become the dominant cash crop of the South, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million slaves in the United States (nearly 75 percent) were involved in the production of cotton. Yet, cotton was a relative latecomer in the story of slavery in America. Between the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown in August 1619 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery (December 6, 1865), cotton only becomes a significant factor after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Nonetheless, during that 72-year period, an estimated one million individuals were enslaved in the service of "King Cotton," either by transatlantic or by domestic slave traders. How did tiny little fibers ensnare Africans and their descendents and bind them to slavery? And, what part did that play in helping cotton to become, as the Cotton Incorporated slogan says, "the fabric of our lives," found in our blue-jeans and bandages, tee-shirts and bed-sheets?
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