Cotton Wood

What if American cottonwoods-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populus_sect._Aegiros --produced a fiber that was equivalent in utility and quality to cotton?

Let's assume that cottonwood fiber is processed and used similar to OTL cotton. Assume that it needs a cotton gin to avoid having to pick out the seeds, same as cotton.

As for harvesting, assume that the cotton falls off trees and is harvested by raking it up from the ground and/or collecting it in nets during winds. Assume that using these methods in the 19th C. the yield per an acre of mature cottonwood trees is about 1/2 to 3/4 the yield from an acre of cotton, though the labor is much less intensive.

I assume this is going to have real effects during the 19th C., when the industrial revolution has made textiles, and therefore mass cotton production, a big deal. The US in particular is going to be different. Are there any significant effects from before the 19th C. that I'm overlooking?

I believe one limiting factor is that cottonwoods need occasional flooding to propagate. If I'm right about that, cottonwood production may be limited unless American or other farmers develop irrigation techniques where they didn't OTL.
 
Well, it seems this system would be a lot less dependent on slave power; slavery gets to be thus a lot less profitable; you end up going roughly the same route as no Cotton Gin, or something similar to what I was going with here (the rough TL post), more or less.
 
Well, it seems this system would be a lot less dependent on slave power; slavery gets to be thus a lot less profitable; you end up going roughly the same route as no Cotton Gin, or something similar to what I was going with here (the rough TL post), more or less.

You are still going to have a slave-holding South, but its probably going to be more economically diversified. I don't think you'd see the same level of tension as OTL, but slavery and the 'negro problem' are still going to be big deals.
 
It sounds awfully similar in labor terms to silk. You're wrong then, about it using slavery. Silk was a casual labor crop, and when introduced to Italy and France, was often done by women and children of the household. It doesn't sound like it is intensive enough to justify the expense of slave labor.
 
It sounds awfully similar in labor terms to silk. You're wrong then, about it using slavery. Silk was a casual labor crop, and when introduced to Italy and France, was often done by women and children of the household. It doesn't sound like it is intensive enough to justify the expense of slave labor.

I'm not suggesting the Cotton Wood arboriculture will expand slavery. Its just that the slaves are already in America and already widespread before cotton became king. This doesn't butterfly slavery, though it probably reduces a lot of the tensions it caused.
 
But the reason cotton didn't boom earlier IOTL was because of issues regarding its spread inland (the same thing that delayed tobacco for a little while) It was still a good crop to invest in that early.

These cotton-woods will have an undeniable effect on the South straight from the beginning. Georgia's aversion to slave labor will find its silk, so to speak. The thing is, such a huge change as this will undeniably affect the system in the South from the beginning.

And again, you wouldn't use slaves for this. Even if the slaves are already there, you would put them towards a task with a more intensive nature.
 
When Eli Whitney invented the workable cotton gin in 1793, it was hoped that his machine would free up the thousands and thousands of hours of labor (mostly slave) needed to clear a bale's worth of cotton of the seeds, etc., and possibly eliminate the use of slave labor in cotton cultivation. Well obviously that didn't happen. Cotton growers were able to adjust where to put all their slave labor to yield the most profit - in the fields - planting, caring for, and then picking the cotton.

However, if in 1793, when Whitney came up with the gin, the cotton crop was harvested from the cottonwood tree as the OP imagines, then an entirely different type of cotton culture would develop. If slave labor wasn't necessary at all in any of the process from planting, cultivating, picking the cotton, and readying it for market, then cotton growers wouldn't simply use slaves because they were there. Cotton growers would look to their bottom line and sell their slaves to the man running a sugar plantation in Louisiana.

Then, with the entire process from growing, harvesting, and then readying the cotton for market, freed from any labor intensity, we might see the average farmer with 40 acres of cottonwood trees, be able to rely on himself and his family to raise the cotton crop each year and then sell it for enough money to earn a decent living. Further, if the soil, climate, and percipitation needs of cottonwood tree cultivation was similar to that of the cotton plant, and so would thrive in the South, you would see a Southern US filled with small and large farms of cottonwood trees and no slave culture.

There might be a few areas, like southern Louisiana, where raising sugar cane made since, and that is labor intensive, so slavery would probably still thrive in those pockets for a few decades.
 
Top