The Adversities of Progress: How to Overcome Them

Progress is always a good thing but when mishandled, its process can have many negative ramifications, a good example being American industrialization and slavery. The book Give me Liberty by Eric Foner tells the story of the ugly, cruel, and repressible practice of slavery and the slave trade. With regard to the cotton gin, the textbook presents the gin as having been a direct contributor to the exacerbation of slavery, although this was never the intent of Whitney. Conversely, the primary article “Eli Whitney's Patent for the Cotton Gin” relates to the invention and patenting of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. The primary article focuses more on the patenting process and prevalent laws and rules than the impact of the gin on slavery. The article also outlines how the rejuvenation of the cotton industry had the impact of increasing invention, which led to the demand for slaves hence increasing both slavery and the slave trade in America. The textbook and the primary source thus present the relationship between the cotton gin and slavery very differently. The primary source presents slavery as an unfortunate side effect of the invention while the textbook directly lays the blame for the worsening of slavery and the slave trade on the invention. It is important to state that to some extent, both publications are true about how the cotton gin affected slavery. Their primary difference lies in how each of them approaches and presents the cause and effect relationship between the two. 

Part Two: Reply to Joan Brodsky Schur's Article 

Joan, you have written a great article that shows an understanding of both the textbook and the primary article. Your analysis about how the invention of the cotton gin contributed to the exacerbation of the problem of slavery is accurate and elaborate. However, there seems to have been a greater focus on the nature of the two articles than there was about their respective contents. Generally, the presentation of the two sources is well done.