Circa1865

It is said that England in 1861 ran twice as many spindles as all other countries combined, with Lancashire at the center. The London Times editorial of September 19, 1861, stated that one-fifth of the entire British population was held to be dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the prosperity of Southern cotton, which accounted for 80 percent of the total English importation of raw cotton. Additional cotton was sent north to the busy cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.

And it cannot be forgotten that it was Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney who brought forth the cotton gin. This invention replaced the slow method of pulling seeds by hand, increased cotton crop yield and helped perpetuate African slavery in America.

Cotton for the North and England

“For ten years past whenever Southern threats of secession had been indulged in, the writers and politicians of that section had expanded upon cotton as the one great wealth-producing industry of America and as the one produce which would compel European acquiescence in American policy, whether of the union, before 1860, or if the South, if she should decide upon independence.”

A writer in DeBow’s Review declared “the South annually throws upon the world for the poor & the naked, [and] we are doing more to advance civilization . . . than all the canting philanthropists of New England & Old England will do in centuries. Slavery is the backbone of the Northern commercial as it is of the British manufacturing system . . .”

Before the Civil War was underway Charles Greville wrote to Clarendon: “Any war will be almost sure to interfere with [the South’s) cotton crops, and this is really what affects us and what we care about. With all our virulent abuse of slavery and slave-owners, and our continual self-laudation on that subject, we are just as anxious for, and as much interested in, the prosperity of the slavery interest in the Southern States, as the Caribbean, as the Carolinian and Georgian planters themselves, and all Lancashire would deplore a successful insurrection of the slaves [by northern abolitionists], if such a thing were possible.”

(Great Britain and the American Civil War. Volume II. Ephraim Douglass Adams. Alpha Editions, 2018 (original 1924), pp. 300-301)