Eli Whitney: The Life and Legacy of the American Inventor Whose Cotton Gin Transformed the Antebellum South

In the 1600s, cotton and silk fabrics that bore colorful and exotic printed patterns, known as “calico,” were flying off the shelves of the East India Company's stores. The rapidly escalating demand for calico had taken a visible toll on the European textile businesses. The trend spread across Europe and North America, and picking cotton was such an arduous task that even when relying almost entirely on slave labor, it was hard to make cotton a profitable industry in North America.

That al...