“Had the cotton gin of Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney not come on the scene in the late 1700’s, African slavery in this country was most likely doomed. 

The antislavery and emancipation feeling in the South was ascendant, but thwarted by profitable slave-trading and hungry cotton mills in New England which gave rise to more plantations in the South, and the perpetuation of slavery. 

And after years of treating the American South as an agricultural colony, New England set out in 1861 to strip it of political power.”
Bernhard Thuersam- Director Cape Fear Historical Institute NC.