If the cotton gin were delayed, how long does slavery last?

Let's say that for some undetermined reason (say, a lightning strike caused a fire that burned Whitney's workshop to the ground) the cotton gin is delayed perhaps ten years. It's been said that slavery was fading slowly at the time, but the gin gave it new life. Would that decade of delay been enough to be fatal to this institution, whether immediately or eventually?
 
I'm not sure completely about the slow death thing, I'm not a historian.*
But if a continual loss of slavery continues, but the cotton gin also shows up you'll at least splinter the powerbase of those remaining southern states who may not be able to count on some of their brethren (Not that I think it would be the deep south that emancipates, that would go to the border states and maybe Texas) in the event that slavery still becomes the hot button issue.


EDIT: That is to say I'm not sure how thorough the independent emancipations state by state would be for the OTL slave states, Virginia might but what about Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi ? In the end I feel like you'd just have the same result, you just draw the line a bit lower and the South is in an even weaker position, but that being said: Legislative Emancipation is made all the more realistic, seeing as the scales are tipped even further in the direction of the North which will, at some point, produce pro-abolition statesmen.

I don't think a delayed cotton gin kills slavery, but the South's eventual bite is going to be lacking a lot of venom.
 
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As I stated at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/r17xzhZ4zmg/Pu_apwkipEoJ:

***

Let's go back to the question of whether slavery was declining before the
invention of the cotton gin or would have disappeared had it been invented
somewhat later. My answer is No to both questions.

It is a myth that slavery was dying out before the cotton gin. Too many
people assume that slavery equals the Southern plantation system equals
cotton. That was actually not true until *many* years after the invention
of the cotton gin. As late as 1800 only about 11 percent of all slaves
lived on cotton plantations. (By 1850, with greatly increased world demand
for cotton, that had risen to 64 percent.)
http://books.google.com/books?id=F-KIAOQxKigC&pg=PA30 Tobacco made a
considerable recovery after the Revolution, and spread to new regions in
South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Slaves were also used in
the production of rice, sugar (after Louisiana was annexed) and grains.

Of course, there *were* some areas of the South that were much better
suited for cotton than for any other crop--above all the black belt of
Alabama and the alluvial areas of Mississippi. But these areas were not
opened up to the plantation system until many years after the cotton gin. I
guess my problem with "no cotton gin" hypotheticals is this--I find it very
implausible that nobody would *ever* think of the cotton gin. And I don't
believe that a mere delay in its discovery would leave slavery so weakened
in the interim that Southerners would be willing to abandon it. "There were
in fact, almost as many Africans brought into the United States during the
30 years from 1780 to 1810 as during the previous 160 years." (Robert
Fogel, *Without Consent or Contract*, p. 32.) And these 30 years were a
period in which cotton was by no means dominant.

And southern congressmen in the early 1790's--well before the expansion of
the Cotton Kingdom--seemed as belligerent on the subject of slavery as
their counterparts of decades later. Consider the following remarks by
Congressman Jackson of Georgia in 1790 (before the cotton gin was even
invented) in response to some antislavery petitions:

"[T]he people of the Southern states will resist one tyranny as soon as
another. The other parts of the Continent may bear them down by force of
arms, but they will never suffer themselves to be divested of their
property without a struggle. The gentleman says, if he was a Federal
Judge, he does not know to what length he would go in emancipating these
people; but I would believe his judgment would be of short duration in
Georgia, perhaps even the existence of such a judge might be in danger."
http://books.google.com/books?id=DmkFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA209

Likewise, Federalist Congressman William Smith of South Carolina on March
17, 1790 made a speech attacking federal interference which "developed
every argument for slavery as a positive good which Calhoun would bring
forward half a century later."
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2168/2127
 
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