Cotton and Hemp

Cotton is a natural fiber producer for manufacturing cloths. Its sweet nectar attracts destructive insect pests a variety like, boll weevil, boll worm, army worm, and the red spider. One of the fungus’s called Witt also destroys the root system of the cotton plant.

To determine the origin of cotton is very difficult one can say that nature bounded humanity to its basic instincts to cover up his body and for that it used different sort of things from leafs to finding the remarkable stuff like cotton. But at this stage of technological advancement scientists say that it is almost 7000 years ago that fiber and boll fragments were discovered and the idea began of producing sort of clothing with it. Estimated that, for about 5000 years it’s been grown in India. China, Egypt, North and South America probably used it for much longer. European settlers grew it as their early business at the Jamestown colony in 1607. Before 1861-1865 Cotton was the most important crop in Southern US states. Slaves use to work all day picking cotton for their masters in the presence of the overseers, who used to be on the horses.

England was one of the South’s largest cotton customers. Considering rightly that the cotton was as good as gold New Orleans was the major l9th-century port for cotton export. Cotton used to play most important role as barter trade between many countries. This plan worked until 1862 when the Union army occupied New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Federal forces raided from Morgan City up to Alexandria. Vicksburg and Port Hudson fell, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River. As Confederate troops retreated, they destroyed as much of the cotton crop as possible, to prevent this “gold” from falling into enemy hands.

Hemp

It is believed that no historian know the first people to put hemp to good use. But whenever and wherever people discovered Cannabis hemp, they used it for five of its benefits those are, hempen fibers, oil from the seeds, the seeds for food, as a medicine, and for the narcotic properties it possessed.

Cannabis hemp use exists for the past ten thousand years. That makes it the oldest cultivated crop. It was cultivated in China as early as nearly 4000 B.C. in most of the historical documents Hemp is mentioned. It is mentioned in Zend-Avesta, a sacred book as old as 600 B.C. Chinese Emperor Chen-Nung wrote about it 5000 years ago record tells us that Hemp in 1621 was also used for depression cure and in 1764 as for inflammation for skin.

The use of hemp In Africa is also mentioned in its history, it was used to cure dysentery, and fevers, many tribes in Africa even in this advanced era of medicine and technology uses hemp to treat snake bites, women use it to smoke before giving birth to an infant. Around seventeenth century peasants and, farmers would pick flowers from their hemp plants and feed them to their livestock to protect the animals from evil and sickness.

They believed it has a magical power, and practiced this tradition.

Some of the western physicians used hemp as medicine too; W.B. O’Shaughnessy published in 1839 the benefits of cannabis for the treatment of rabies, rheumatism, epilepsy, and tetanus. Also reported it to be helpful when mixed with alcohol and taken orally was very effective, pain killer.

It was used by Henry VIII for the purpose of maritime in England it was cultivated on one quarter of an acre for every sixty acres of land under tillage. The British started its cultivation in its Canadian colonies in 1606, in Virginia 1611.and in 1632 New England started its cultivation that was produced by the pilgrims, it was taught to them by Native American people.

It was a very tedious and hard production process of hemp. So it was up to the slaves to cultivate. The domestic cultivation of hemp was effected after the civil war in America. It affected its economy hugely.

But later it was the chain of Hearst newspaper that did the propaganda against it. Through the Hearst newspaper the phrase was coined “Marijuana Madness” relating to Mexican, African American, and jazz musicians, it was said that the use of marijuana caused excessive sex, and violence, and threatened the safety of white women and children. Following this campaign against hemp it was not long before the complete prohibition of hemp was enacted.