Antebellum cotton farming rapidly depleted soil, forcing relentless westward expansion for new land

Evidence

Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could master textiles and make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could tolerate only a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced a thousand pounds of cotton yielded only four hundred a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 556

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Soil formation takes centuries, making its loss nearly irreparable — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 230