A Piece of American History...

As Canadians, we are used to seeing cornfields as we drive along our country roads.  Here, in the south, most fields are filled with cotton.  And what a sight it is, too!  Although it is late in the season,

we stopped by a country road yesterday and I quickly snapped a few pictures to share with you (and yes, I took two pods with raw cotton attached -- In my defense, I did this so that Nat can show her students what raw cotton looks like).

As we all know, early American settlers grew cotton...a lot of cotton...and this required a lot of slaves to pick and gin (remove the seeds from the raw cotton) by hand. 

With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (a machine that automated the separation of the cottonseed from the cotton fibre), a man could clean 50 times as much as before.  This increased the demand for slaves and in 1803, more than 20,000 slaves were brought into the southern states to work in the cotton fields.