Another Error by a Harvard Professor

Making slow progress through "These Truths" by Jill Lepore. See my previous post.

On page 172 she writes of Jefferson: "As late as 1815 he was boasting that, as a result of the embargo, 'carding machines in every neighborhood, spinning machines in large families and wheels in the small, are too radically established to ever be relinquished.'  That year, cotton and slave plantations in the American South were shipping seventeen million bales of cotton to England...."

That's flat wrong.  We've never exported that much cotton, never grown that much cotton.  The statement is sourced to Sven Beckert's history.  https://www.sailsinc.org/durfee/earl2.pdf

I'm having fun with this, so I've added "Harvard" to my lables.