125. King Cotton and his Lancashire Famine

After talking last week about wars in China and Italy, and potentially with France, in this episode we turn to the United States where one of the biggest wars of the nineteenth century was just breaking out. That was the American Civil War.

We’ll see how the secessionist southern, slaveholding states, soon to call themselves the Confederate States of America, made a disastrous miscalculation, by blocking their own exports of cotton. It was a lethal self-inflicted wound, but it also caused terrible hardship in Britain where the textiles and its feeder industries had become the nation's biggest employer.

Britain remained divided over the war, with many in government, including three of the most important ministers, Palmerston, the Prime Minister, Russell, the Foreign Secretary, and Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, favoured the South. Indeed, at one point it looked as though Britain might well get involved in the war against Abraham Lincoln’s Union side.

In the end, though, Britain remained neutral. One of the contributory factors had to be the extraordinarily courageous, and self-sacrificing, behaviour of the people in Lancashire who were suffering the most from the cotton embargo. When Lincoln turned the war into one against slavery, they met and wrote to urge him to keep up the fight, despite the suffering it was causing them, until the Confederates were defeated, and the slaves freed.

And they even got back a reply from the President with a tribute to their spirit.

Illustration: Francis Bicknell Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation (detail). Public Domain. Lincoln is on the left, Seward the seated figure to the right.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.