Justene Hill Edwards

And these two forms kind of fleeing and fighting scared enslavers.

They were afraid of armed slaves.

They were afraid of losing their investments when slaves fled.

And so these were two kind of major aspects in which the enslaved fought back and fought for their own freedom and emancipation.

Sure.

Well, again, I'm going to just take a brief step back.

If we kind of track the evolution of American cotton, there are a few important particular moments.

So we are in the end of the revolutionary period.

Let's say we're in the 1780s, 1790s.

One of the major catalysts was actually the slavery revolt in Saint-Domingue, modern day Haiti.

And so the Haitian revolution is

had an indelible, a tremendous effect on slavery in the Atlantic world and slavery in the U.S.

And so it is because of the effects of the Haitian Revolution that Thomas Jefferson negotiates with France to buy the Louisiana Territory in 1803.

And so when that happens with the Louisiana Purchase, the U.S.

immediately doubles in size and it makes all of this land immediately available for the federal government to start to invest in.

And what do they invest in?

They start to sell land to land speculators, enslavers start to buy land, seeing this land available online.

for kind of agricultural production and investment.

And at the same time, we have innovations made to cotton gin technology by Whitney.

And so when he gets a patent for this new cotton gin, all of these things are converging at the same time.