The first English settlers in America found little or no cotton
among the natives. But they soon began to import the fiber from
the West Indies, whence came also the plant itself into the
congenial soil and climate of the Southern colonies. During the
colonial period, however, cotton never became the leading crop,
hardly an important crop. Cotton could be grown profitably only
where there was an abundant supply of exceedingly cheap labor,
and labor in America, white or black, was never and could never
be as cheap as in India. American slaves could be much more
profitably employed in the cultivation of rice and indigo.

Three varieties of the cotton plant were grown in the South. Two
kinds of the black-seed or long-staple variety thrived in the
sea-islands and along the coast from Delaware to Georgia, but
only the hardier and more prolific green-seed or short-staple
cotton could. be raised inland. The labor of cultivating and
harvesting cotton of any kind was very great. The fiber, growing
in bolls resembling a walnut in size and shape, had to be taken
by hand from every boll, as it has to be today, for no
satisfactory cotton harvester has yet been invented. But in the
case of the green-seed or upland cotton, the only kind which
could ever be cultivated extensively in the South, there was
another and more serious obstacle in the way, namely, the
difficulty of separating the fiber from the seeds. No machine yet
devised could perform this tedious and unprofitable task. For the
black-seed or sea-island cotton, the churka, or roller gin, used
in India from time immemorial, drawing the fiber slowly between a
pair of rollers to push out the seeds, did the work imperfectly,
but this churka was entirely useless for the green-seed variety,