It sounds wild, but AFAIK, the cotton gin and maybe some other forms of automation actually made slavery more profitable!
From Wikipedia: > Whitney’s gin made cotton farming more profitable, so plantation owners expanded their plantations and used more slaves to pick the cotton. Whitney never invented a machine to harvest cotton, it still had to be picked by hand. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War.
It sounds wild, but AFAIK, the cotton gin and maybe some other forms of automation actually made slavery more profitable!
From Wikipedia:
> Whitney’s gin made cotton farming more profitable, so plantation owners expanded their plantations and used more slaves to pick the cotton. Whitney never invented a machine to harvest cotton, it still had to be picked by hand. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War.