Page 39 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

J. H. Aylsworth, via the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Above: Women and children in a cotton field in the 1860s. Opening pages: The New York Stock Exchange, July 2019

since the end of slavery, only two. white in bloom. Men, women and commodities. Cotton is everywhere, often with military force, acquir-

It is not surprising that we can children picked, using both hands in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before ing Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee
still feel the looming presence to hurry the work. Some picked the industrialization of cotton, peo- and Florida. It then sold that land

of this institution, which helped in Negro cloth, their raw product ple wore expensive clothes made of on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in

turn a poor, fledgling nation into returning to them by way of New wool or linen and dressed their beds the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dol-

a financial colossus. The surprising England mills. Some picked com- in furs or straw. Whoever mastered lars) — to white settlers. Naturally,

bit has to do with the many eerily pletely naked. Young children ran cotton could make a killing. But cot- the first to cash in were the land

specific water across the humped rows, ton needed land. A field could only speculators. Companies operating

ways slavery can still be

felt in our economic life. ‘‘Ameri- while overseers peered down from tolerate a few straight years of the in Mississippi flipped land, selling

can slavery is necessarily imprint- horses. Enslaved workers placed crop before its soil became deplet- it soon after purchase, commonly

of
ed on the DNA American cap- each cotton boll into a sack slung ed. Planters watched as acres that for double the price.

italism,’’ write the historians Sven around their necks. Their haul had initially produced 1,000 pounds Enslaved workers felled trees by

Beckert and Seth Rockman. The would be weighed after the sun- of cotton yielded only 400 a few sea- ax, burned the underbrush and lev-

task now, they argue, is ‘‘cataloging light stalked away from the fields sons later. The thirst for new farm- eled the earth for planting. ‘‘Whole

the dominant and recessive traits’’ and, as the freedman Charles Ball land grew even more intense after forests were literally dragged out by

that have been passed down to us, recalled, you couldn’t ‘‘distinguish the invention of the cotton gin in the the roots,’’ John Parker, an enslaved

tracing the unsettling and often the weeds from the cotton plants.’’ early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twist-

unrecognized lines of descent by If the haul came up light, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they ed mass of vegetation was replaced

which America’s national sin is workers were often whipped. ‘‘A could clean. The gin broke the bot- by a single crop. An origin of Amer-

now being visited upon the third short day’s work was always pun- tleneck, making it possible to clean ican money exerting its will on the

Photography by They picked in long rows, bent bod- what oil was to the 20th: among shortage by expropriating millions for profit, is found in the cotton
you could grow.
Ball wrote.

as much cotton as
earth, spoiling the environment
ished,’’

and fourth generations.
The United States solved its land

Cotton
was to the 19th century

plantation. Floods became big-

ies shuffling through cotton fields

The lack

of acres from Native
world’s most widely traded
ger and more common.
the

Americans,
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