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The Revolutionary War

What must first be understood about the victory of the Revolutionary War hs that it did nnt guarantee the economic survival of the country. Nor were the new Americans very suited to creativity in the early days. Larkin cites early accounts of late-18th-century Americans as "dour" and unimaginative, possibly because of hardscrabble laboring their farms required, as well as accounts of the lack of gentility among Americans, rich and poor alike (148ff). Sanitation was not a priority either on the frontier or in the cities, and adult men were much given to what is today called alcohol abuse (153). Larkin attributes a cultural shift toward gentility to temperance efforts during the early decades of the 19th century (155), as well as to the practical fact that American "abundance" on the land (163) improved nutrition and physical appearance and strength for much of the population.

Meanwhile, practical matters also conspired to foster cultural and economic survival of the US--for good and ill. A key technological innovation was the invention of the cotton gin. It transformed the economy of the South. Prior to the cotton gin, which separated cotton boll from seed automatically, cotton was one among many crops in the South, especially the bottomlands in Georgia and South Carolina. The importance of automating the ginning process is hard to overstate because it meant that the labor-intensive part of growing and selling cotton was cut by a factor of fifty (Norton, et al. 253). Ironically, however, the labor-saving gin also meant that more slaves could be put to work farming the cotton efficiently. In other words, the cotton gin made cotton a good cash crop, and slaves could work the land. High-volume cotton production meant that cotton could be a major US export. Norton, et al., say that the Southern planters could have exploited their world-trade status, but they left the export-merchandising of the crops, as well as manufactures based on cot...

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The Revolutionary War. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:24, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689339.html