The title says it all. Was slavery necessary for cotton farming to be economically viable?
Given that it was viable even with slavery, it certainly would have also been viable without. Slavery is actually less efficient than free workers.
Yeah, slaves weren’t the only people who raised cotton. I’m the first generation of my family that didn’t pick it. My mother helped as a child, my grandmother was the daughter of a cotton sharecropper and was born on a farm. I don’t have the history of it, but probably generations before that were involved in cotton farming even before that but after slavery. And of course cotton is still raised around the world today sans slaves.
Turn the question around: was slavery more viable because of cotton?
Yes. The cotton gin prolonged slavery for decades. It was in decline before that.
That’s because mechanical cotton pickers were perfected, No one is seriously picking it by hand.
I don’t think this is true, at least from the perspective of the plantation owners. Free and compulsory labor was more efficient for them than paid labor, even if it was obviously less efficient for the overall society.
The overall answer is no, but I’m going to assume we’re talking about the American colonies and what would eventually become the United States. Let’s look at cotton in the Americas for a moment. British colonist were planting cotton in the 17th century, and like tobacco and sugar, it was a very labor intensive crop that was typically grown and processed with slave labor. For cotton, you needed a large labor force to plant the cotton, water and weed while it’s growing, and to harvest it. Back in the day, all the bowls didn’t open at the same time, so you had to send your laborers down the rows every day during the harvest so they could use their judgment about which ones were ready to pick that day. This is in sharp contrast to wheat or corn where typically harvest it all at the same time.
Imagine it’s 1680 and you’re a South Carolina cotton farmer. How are you going to attract laborers when it’s time to plant, cultivate, and harvest? Keeping in mind you need experienced laborers for harvest? Maybe you can pay them when its time to plant and harvest, but you can’t afford to pay them year round. And these people aren’t going to just hang around and be available for hire when they’re out there living their own lives. Probably far away from you. Would you want to live in South Carolina before air conditioning was invented?
Even with slave labor, it was difficult to profit off cotton, and without the cotton gin it might very well have been phased out. Give the situation in the 17th century, it would have been unlikely for cotton to have succeeded without slave labor.
The point of slavery isn’t that it is cheaper than the free labor market but that slaves are property which is bound to owners and cannot leave, so a plantation owner doesn’t have to worry that slaves will migrate to jobs with better pay or working conditions. In addition, because under the American system of chattel slavery the children of enslaved people were also considered enslaved to the person who ‘owned’ the mother, they could be put to work as soon as they were able, often to great profitability as owners didn’t have to expend money to purchase them. At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, enslaved boys as young as ten worked at the nailery for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week (note that the cite is from the Jefferson Foundation), and indeed the nailery was the main if not exclusive source of profit for Monticello for many years. It was also a way to evaluate and train enslaved people for more skilled roles and to also create a self-reinforcing hierarchy that would keep slaves loyal to Jefferson and unwilling to try to escape and end up where treatment and opportunities may be worse.
Slavery was actually declining in the South prior to the introduction of the modern long-staple cotton gin because slaves were not very effective as farm hands and the nature of the work made it easy for them to escape. While your high school history text likely presented Eli Whitney as the inventor of the mechanical cotton gin (there is some debate on the issue) it was actually the improvements introduced in 1840 by Fones McCarthy that made long-staple cotton suitable for forming into durable textiles, which resulted in a massive increase in cotton farming. The picking of cotton bolls is a very labor intensive (and painful) process so having cheap, readily available labor was important to making cotton a commercially viable industry, as was having people to operate and maintain the cotton gins in the pre-Industrial era.
The owning of slaves in this era also became synonymous with wealth and commercial success since, aside from tobacco farming (mostly done in Virginia and North Carolina by poor whites), it was the only real export industry the American South had (particularly trade with the British), and there was a social cachet in many areas of being able to have ‘extra’ slaves and treat them abusively with impunity. So, owning slaves became an end onto itself, and there were many people involved in the importation and trading of slaves, even despite the 1807 “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves”, and it actually became a speculator market where people would promise to deliver slaves in time for harvest to plantation owners and then scramble to import, find, or kidnap enough bodies to fulfill their orders. (Jefferson’s crushing debts actually came from such a deal that his father-in-law had become embroiled in and which he honored as an inheritance).
As to whether cotton farming would have been viable without slavery, I think the technical advances in processing and demand for textiles (especially to equip armies with fabric that could be easily dyed in bright colors) would have made it profitable at some price level, but the availability of enslaved people made it easier for plantation owners to control costs and assure labor resources even if the costs of maintaining the whole infrastructure to prevent slaves from escaping wasn’t technically cheaper. Of course, the plantation owners also lived in a kind of constant paranoia about their enslaved workers rising up in rebellion as well as abolitionist sentiments from the North, which made slavery untenable in the long term without the South effectively becoming a pariah state.
Stranger
Slight nit pick. It’s bolls, not bowls.
Easy to miss. I know. 
Dang nabbit! I specifically told myself it was bolls not bowls and still $#%# it up! You know my mama picked cotton and my daddy boll weevil it was history, it wasn’t me.
The tricky issue is hidden in the word “viable.” Cotton was certainly grown in the colonies and in other countries before the invention of the modern cotton engine or “gin”. (I say modern because the difficulty of separating cotton fibers was always an issue and various mechanical separators appeared regularly.) Viable implies two questions: did slavery make cotton profitable and also did cotton make slavery profitable. They both have to be answered before we can speculate whether cotton would have been profitable if the South could have lured low-paid free workers in the necessary numbers.
Those are hard questions. Historians have been debating them seriously since the appearance of revisionist history in the 1950s, revisionist meaning upending the old Lost Cause state rights slaves were well-treated treatment of the Civil War.
What we know is that cotton was a tiny crop in the 18th century. Then it boomed like oil in the 20th century. By 1860 it was 75% of the world’s supply and 60% of American profits. The South had a stranglehold on cotton since it could grow almost nowhere in the North. It was also a destructive crop, wearing out land in a mere decade. That meant a constant pressure to find new land in the territories and also to legalize slavery in them. The entirety of the political slavery question pre-war was based on this.
Have historians teased out cause and effect from this? They go both ways, trying to sift meaning from the extremely limited statistical record. I believe the latest consensus is that the limited resources doled out to slaves after purchase, along with the forced breeding of their own replacements, made the cost of slave productivity lower than that of factory worker productivity. True, slaves cost money their entire lives while workers only had to be paid for actual work time, but it’s also the case that slaves develops an enormous range of skills that northern employers would have to pay separately for. That slave labor was less efficient is mostly a myth based on older stereotypes and the difficulty of comparing productivity from plantations to factories. Newer research says otherwise.
The estimates based on this new approach suggest that the increase in output per enslaved worker was responsible for roughly a fifth of the growth in commodity output per capita for the United States as a whole between 1839 and 1859—between 18.7 percent and 24.3 percent. At the latter end of this time period, in 1859, enslaved Americans accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. population.
I’m being long-winded because all these factors contribute to even modest speculation about the OP’s question. Alternate history can support any answer. If you pin me down, I would guess that the incredible money potentially derivable from cotton would have made it a desired crop even if the cost of labor was increased but that it would in no way match the money actually made. Most immigrant workers in the North came from northern European countries. They did not do well in the southern climate and had had little historic exposure to the diseases endemic to the South. It would have been much harder to attract and keep immigrant labor, and required much higher pay as well as laws repressing their ability to quit and move on. Could that create a sufficient deterrent to make cotton nonviable? Probably not. The lure of profit usually finds a way.
I’ve been pecking away at this post for a while and I see others have slipped in answers. I’ll just leave this as is and come back to respond when I have more time.
Not with the technology available at the time. It required hard manual field labor to pick the cotton.
Correct.
Not today anyway.
Good point.
I think you might mean 19th century, i.e. the 1800’s.
The British managed to grow cotton in India after their supply from the South was gone. But there they had a massive amount of cheap unskilled labor, something that the USA didnt have.
So, in the USA, given the labor force then available, no- cotton would not have been financially viable in large areas. As it was with slavery.
Note that the USA was by no means alone in the use of slaves- The Caribbean, and South America - especially Brazil who took some time to finally abolish slavery (1888, but the law met with resistance and was slow to percolate). Brazil had more than 5 million slaves, as opposed to the 3.5 million in the South.
Slavery has been an issue since the first cave man was able to swipe others from a neighboring cave.
I doubt there’s any country on earth that has not had dirty hands about it. And much past shame.
Does not excuse the USA. Number of slaves doesn’t matter. One is too many.
I think this thread is about the American south and cotton crops.
Was it viable post 13th Amendment when the sharecropper system came into effect?
I’d like to see stats on that.
We know production was nearly ceased during the Civil War. But after how quick was it to pick up?
Profitable isn’t the same as efficient. Slavery let them offload much of the cost and effort onto their slaves and larger society (which created an entire vast system for enforcing slavery), making it profitable. For them. That didn’t change the fact that slaves are inefficient, unmotivated workers (for obvious reasons).
Privatize all the profit, and socialize all the externalities and as many of the costs as possible. Right from the standard playbook.
Exactly. Conceptually it’s the same principle as a company saving money by dumping waste, slashing quality control and ignoring safety while refusing to pay for the downsides. They’re making more money not because they are more “efficient”, but because they are shoving so much of the cost onto everyone else.
Slavery is just, you, know, even more blatantly, directly evil.
You may well be right, and I hope you are.
But there’s a lot to unpack here. Presumably depends on a lot of social factors.
This might be a time to ask the traditional question: cite?
Only if those same free workers are willing to do back-breaking labor under inhumane conditions. Are there any solid examples of successful cotton farms employing free people for a decent amount of time, or is this pretty much theoretical?
Jack Kerouac wrote about picking cotton (and how he made enough money not to literally starve but no more than that— so it was the cotton farm owners who were successful, not the people laboring under inhumane, back-breaking conditions), so it is not theoretical.