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To: JDN who wrote (1292)	4/2/2006 6:59:06 AM
From: goldworldnet	Respond to of 14758

The industrial revolution could have changed everything. * * *

To: JDN who wrote (1292)	4/2/2006 11:12:58 AM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 14758

Kids too. John Deere tractor and attachments it would have eventually eliminated the need for slavery.

To: JDN who wrote (1292)	4/3/2006 7:02:55 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14758

You mentioning the John Deere tractor changes the time frame I figured was being discussed. Yes, mechanization of agriculture would have made slavery obsolete in time. A lot of time though. Tractor introduction happened pretty recently - within my parent's life time. See the graph showing the decline of horses and mules and the rise of tractors in the US: eh.net Mechanization of cotton picking came even later - the big increase was in the 1950's and 1960's. This article indicates migration of laborers (free of course) from the south stinulated the switch to mechanized cotton pickers - not the reverse of machines replacing hand pickers who afterward moved away. eh.net The evidence is overwhelming that migration greatly accelerated mechanization. The first commercial production of mechanical cotton pickers were manufactured in 1949, and these machines did not exist in large numbers until the early 1950s. Since the Great Migration began during World War I, mechanical pickers cannot have played any causal role in the first four decades of the migration. By 1950, soon after the first mechanical cotton pickers were commercially available, over six million migrants had already left the South. (See Table 1.) A decade later, most of the nation's cotton was still hand picked. Only by the late 1960s, when the migration was losing momentum, did machines harvest virtually the total cotton crop.