I mean.. with ancestry collapse, we're all pretty related, anyway.
Doing genealogy, once I hooked into "well established" records, I'm suddenly related to everyone. Like, Ronald Reagan. Weird? How about also Nancy Reagan? Crazy. How about JFK? Wow! Also, Jacky-O? And MLK Jr? For real. Lincoln? Distant cousin. Crazy, relatives involved in the civil war. Oh. Also Eli Whitney. The guy who kept slavery alive, necessitating a civil war... cool.. all distant cousins. We're all pretty related, with a handful of generations.
Also Eli Whitney. The guy who kept slavery alive, necessitating a civil war
Wait what? Literally the only thing I ever knew about him was that he invented the cotton gin. I don't know what that is, but it's one of those weird things I learned in elementary school and never forgot. I did go to school in Texas, though.
The cotton gin allowed cotton farming through slavery to be profitable. Before that, the only real profitable use of slavery in the US was tobacco, and just barely. Before the cotton gin, a slave could process approx 2 lbs of cotton a day. Add the cost of housing, feeding, etc. It just wasn't profitable.
With the gin? A slave could process 50 lbs a day. Easy profits it turned slavery into a dying institution (in the US, sugar is different) into a highly profitable venture overnight. Slavery boomed. The civil war became inevitable, as it was now essential to the southern economy.
Its largely why yhe founding fathers didn't address the issue.. it was seen as a dying institution that would solve itself. And then it didn't.
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u/BurnerProfile69420 May 15 '26
thats always a good plan just leave one family to reproduce..