Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Magellan, and others speak of the various uses to which the fiber was put, and admired the striped awnings and the colored mantles made by the natives.

It seems probable that cotton was in use in the New World quite as early as in India.
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.