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"... In 1798 he figured out how to manufacture muskets by machine so that the parts were interchangeable. It was as a manufacturer of muskets that Whitney finally became rich. If his genius led King Cotton to triumph in the South, it also created the technology with which the North won the Civil War."

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That's one take, sure. But the original point I was making was what if southern farmers had failed to make a large profit off of slave labor in the first place (with the help of the cotton gin), then maybe they wouldn't have been so attached to the idea of slavery to begin with and the civil war would have been radically different or entirely averted.

The cotton gin was invented in the 1790s. African slaves were used to work the American south for hundreds of years before that.

Depending on what you want to define as the start of slavery, slavery started in the US south between about 1650 and 1700--at best 150 years, and maybe not even 100 years. The entire institution of slavery in the US lasted only 200 years.

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