Eli Whitney's cotton gin mechanized seed removal, making short-staple cotton profitable and triggering massive expansion of plantation slavery across the American South. This technological innovation reversed expectations that slavery would naturally decline, instead entrenching racial capitalism as the region's economic foundation. Cotton became America's leading export, linking Southern plantations to British textile mills through global commodity chains.

African American poets like Phillis Wheatley and later Frances Harper confronted the contradiction between Enlightenment liberty rhetoric and chattel slavery's economic centrality. Abolitionist poetry used sentimental appeals to counter proslavery arguments grounded in economic necessity and property rights. The cotton economy's brutality shaped spirituals and work songs that encoded resistance within musical forms born from forced labor.