A Letter to the President
Two years into America’s Civil War, cotton workers in Manchester defied current opinion among politicians and the press, and pledged their support to the Union.
1863
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Two years into America’s Civil War, cotton workers in Manchester defied current opinion among politicians and the press, and pledged their support to the Union.
1863
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Two years into the American Civil War (1861-65) many in England believed that economic self-interest may yet lie with the South. Nevertheless, the day before Lincoln’s historic declaration of emancipation on January 1st, 1863, cotton workers defied an urgent editorial in the Guardian and met at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall to approve a message of support for the Union.
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TO His Excellency, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.*
As the citizens of Manchester assembled at the Free Trade Hall,* we beg to express our fraternal sentiments towards you and your country. We rejoice in your greatness as an out-growth of England, whose blood and language you share, and whose orderly and legal freedom you have applied to new circumstances over a region immeasurably greater than our own. We honour your Free States as a particularly happy abode for the working millions, where industry is honoured.
One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it, we mean the ascendency of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery but desired to extend and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the Free States in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you,* will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy. We joyfully honour you as the President, and the Congress with you, for many decisive steps towards practically exemplifying your belief in the words of your great founders, “all men are created free and equal.”*
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* What follows are the opening lines only. For the rest, see ‘Manchester and Abraham Lincoln: a side-light on an earlier fight for freedom’ (1900) by F. Hourani.
* The Manchester Free Trade Hall was built in 1853-56 on St Peter’s Fields, where the infamous Peterloo (a darkly humorous blend of ‘Peter’ and ‘Waterloo’) Massacre had taken place in 1819. The Hall was dedicated to the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a victory for free market economics over protectionism, cronyism and bureaucratic paralysis. The cotton workers who wrote to Lincoln were vocally supported by leading names in free market economics, including libertarian philosopher John Stuart Mill and John Bright, MP for Birmingham. “It was” emphasised Sir Thomas Bazley, the local MP and himself a cotton industrialist “the free who sympathised with the free.” The Hall still stands, though now it is a hotel.
The cotton industry in England was directly affected by Union shipping blockades, which prevented Confederate cotton reaching British ports. But Sir Thomas Bazley (1797-1885), a cotton industrialist himself and Liberal MP for Manchester, brushed this aside. “It was not the Northern policy [he is reported as saying] which immediately deprived us of supplies of cotton but an attempt at coercion on the part of the Southern States in order to compel a recognition of their independence (hear, hear). There had been no meetings in the South to assist the unemployed operatives in Lancashire but there had been enthusiastic meetings with that object in New York (hear, hear). It was the free who sympathised with the free.” He noted that John Bright, MP for Birmingham, had urged the industry to source cotton from India instead.
* See A Declaration of Independence. President Lincoln replied on January 19th; for an extract, see Sublime Christian Heroism.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.