Most influential entrepreneur in U.S. history

Today on electoral-vote.com they changed up their usual weekend Q&A by posing questions from readers for other readers to answer. One reader in Germany asked who the most influential entrepreneur in U.S. history was and what effect they had. My response was Eli Whitney. His invention of the cotton gin made cotton farming far more profitable by vastly reducing the time and personnel needed to manually remove cotton seeds from the bolls. This increased efficiency led to cotton replacing other agricultural crops in the South, making the area more wealthy and more dependent on slavery which expanded to fill the increased need for cotton harvesters. As slavery became more entrenched in the South, the sectional divisions in the U.S. were exacerbated, making the Civil War inevitable.

Without the cotton gin, slavery would very likely have gradually diminished organically until it reached the point where it could have been outlawed without the Civil War. Other countries like Great Britain, Brazil, Russia, and others managed to outlaw slavery or serfdom peacefully.