The effects of cotton picking

The past couple of days in US History, my class was assigned assignments to find evidence for various events. The last one being about the effect of cotton on the US economy in the 1800's as well as the inventions that sped this process up. Cotton was an essential part of the US economy, without many economical struggles were bound to happen, as cotton was definitely the first or second most important crop in the United States. Due to inventions being made to reduce the time from when the cotton was picked to when it wound up in the customer's hand, this led to even more inventions to reduce that time. For example, the mechanized loom, also known as the power loom, lead to the invention of the spinning jenny, which lead to Eli Whitney inventing his version of the cotton gin. Cotton was so impactful on the US economy that it lead to a similar, albeit smaller, version of the 1849 gold rush. But, this time people moved to the southeast United States to plant cotton.