which easily separated cotton fiber from its seeds, was merely a motor for a global economic machine. Slavery was its fuel. Many stakeholders benefited from the cotton economy — plantation ...

Slavery and cotton production became synonymous with ... Planters wanted gang labor, like they had used under slavery, to work the fields; freed people wanted to own and work their own land.

Beneath the blazing summer sun on a former slave ... in the fields. America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, sits on 18,000 acres. It was once a patchwork of cotton fields ...