Did slaves use cotton gins?
Yes. Slaves often, almost always, used cotton gins to do their
work on a farm. Since the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 by
Eli Whitney, a southern schoolteacher, cotton gins grew immensely
popular and were used quite often throughout the 1800s as an aid to
both farmers and slaves. With the invention of the cotton gin,
picking the seeds from fluffy cotton bolls was made a much simpler
task. The gin made an easier way for cotton bolls to be separated
from the seeds that farmers didn't need to be sold, and that
couldn't be made into cloth. Slaves usually did the majority of the
farm work on any southern farm, and so they usually used the cotton
gin to help them quicken the task of cleaning cotton. The cotton
gin works through feeding cotton bolls into the machine, spinning a
handle on the side, which separates the cotton from the seeds, and
then fluffy tufts of cleaned cotton come out through the other
side. Cotton gins were initially made to cut down slave labor
because of their simplicity and speed, but in actuality they raised
the amount of slave labor growing in the south because now one
worker could produce more cotton in an hour than 50 workers in the
same amount of time without the aid of a gin. So to answer your
question, yes, slaves utilized cotton gins quite often.