What if the cotton mill was invented 20 years later?

Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton a cash crop that was suitible for slave labor, what if it came 20 years later? Would slavery be in even less then OTL or banned altogether?

Great Heavens. This certainly has been covered before and is easily found in the Archives. There is a difference between a cotton gin and a cotton mill, they are two different things.

David S Poepoe said:

Great Heavens. This certainly has been covered before and is easily found in the Archives. There is a difference between a cotton gin and a cotton mill, they are two different things.

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OK, what was the consensus. I know there is a difference between a cotton gin and a cotton mill. The gin seperates the cotton while the mill makes it into cloth. Before the gin, cotton was seperated by hand and thus very expensive even with slave labor.

As I recall there were two schools of thought. One was that the slaveholders would eventually free their slaves because of the high cost of maitaining them.

There was a second group that believed that the southern planters would hold onto the slaves at all costs.

I belong to the first group. I think that there would have been a slow manumission of the saves, with many being given the opportunity to buy their way out of slavery. Even after the cotton gin is invented there would be a move to free the slaves because by this time the wealthier slaveholders would have their funds invested in other industries.

Perhaps the money they gained through the slaves buying themselves free would have been spent industrializing the south.