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.

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Northwest · M

Or maybe not the inventor, but the group of people who built the Cross-Continental railroad, opening up the West, and turning the US from a tiny nation of renegades, into a great nation, and in the process, nearly exterminating the natives. who inhabited this vast land, for tens of thousands of years.

dancingtongue · 80-89, M

@Northwest I briefly considered them as well, and they certainly played a major role not only in the ways you mention but in the economic impact on all segments of the nation -- be it producer or consumer of products. But while it took entrepreneurship to create the railroads, it was usually consortiums taking advantage of the land incentives that Congress granted them and the new technologies developed by others. Perhaps Robert Fulton with the steam engine that made not only the first train engines but the paddle wheel steamers that served the same function as the trains up and down the Mississippi, Ohio, and contributory rivers prior to the trains.

Northwest · M

@dancingtongue

I briefly considered them as well, and they certainly played a major role not only in the ways you mention but in the economic impact on all segments of the nation -- be it producer or consumer of products. But while it took entrepreneurship to create the railroads, it was usually consortiums taking advantage of the land incentives that Congress granted them and the new technologies developed by others. Perhaps Robert Fulton with the steam engine that made not only the first train engines but the paddle wheel steamers that served the same function as the trains up and down the Mississippi, Ohio, and contributory rivers prior to the trains.

I am mot commenting on the good/bad aspect of it, only the impact. The process was also rife with graft, consumer ripoffs, pyramid schemes, stock market ripoffs, etc. It also produced the so-called robber barons class, who went on to found the US's top universities and charitable organizations. Stanford, Vanderbilt, etc.