The cotton weight data was sourced from original invoiced from the Bates Mill Company in the Bates College Archives. The picture attached is an image of this invoice. The price per pound of cotton at the time the invoice was written was $0.1025. Included on the invoice were sums of some subsets of the bales, but we used the individual weights of each bale to calculate the profit Bates Mill Company made on the purchase of this cotton, which was around $263 at the time — which converts to around $8,826 in 2021. It is vital to consider the work of enslaved people that was used to harvest this cotton. This total estimation of profits made by Bates Mill Company includes data about the work of enslaved people. For each bale of cotton we had data on, we calculated an estimate of the number of days that enslaved people were forced to work, which ranged from 2.69 to 4.13. We also calculated the amount of money that was made from this slave labor for each bale of cotton by multiplying the weight of each bale by the price per pound at the time, $0.1025. These profits ranged from $41.41 to $63.55. Much of this cotton and the textiles produced from it was sold to the Union Army. The Bates Mill where the textiles were made also exploited many women with long working hours and harsh conditions. Clearly, Benjamin Bates had many layers of exploitation within his business.
