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.