The Lancashire Cotton Famine
The Liverpool Connection with the Confederate Army
While America fought out the Civil War , the cotton weavers of Lancashire were brought to the brink of starvation.
At the start of the 19th century Great Britain was riding high as a leading industrial nation.
Lancashire, and it's great port of Liverpool were strategically placed on the western seaboard. Facing the Atlantic and benefitting from this position with increasing trade from America, the vast wealth of the country lay in this part of the island.
Cotton was the driving force.
The Industrial revolution had mechanised cotton production and it seemed. as if Lancashire would be the centre of the trade for ever. After all, woven cotton was in demand all over the world..
All that was to change in the 1860's as America plunged into civil war. The flood of raw cotton bales flowing into Liverpool gradually became a trickle. In today's modern commercial jargon America sneezed, and Lancashire caught the cold.
It was to cost mill owners and weavers nearly £30 m. each. This had a terrible knock-on effect through-out the towns and villages as shop-keepers bills went unpaid, and the retail trade all but disappeared all together.
By 1862 mills were closing, workers laid off and soup kitchens were being set up.
The remaining mill owners clung to the hope that Europe would intervene to persuade the Union to make peace with the Confederates, and remove their blockades of the Confederate ports. After the battle of Antietam, in September of that year, the resulting Union victory gave Abraham Lincoln the necessary clout to issue his Emancipation Proclamation which effectively proclaimed that any support of the Southern States would be tantamount to supporting slavery. It seemed that Lancashire was well and truly scuppered !
The cotton workers, whose increasing poverty was bringing them to the point of starvation, declared their whole-hearted support of the Union’s fight against slavery . So much so that Abraham Lincon sent them a fulsome letter of thanks, parts of which are carved on a commemorative monument in Lincoln Square, Manchester
The mill owners were not so enamoured of Mr Lincoln and his noble ideals. Their livelihood and continuing wealth depended on Southern cotton. Something had to be done.
Behind-the-scenes contact was established with Confederate Agents. One of the leading Confederacy naval officers arrived in Liverpool in some secrecy and commissioned 6 steam vessels, to be delivered, unarmed and under the British flag to the Rebel States.
In 1862 one of the most notorious of these boats, the CSS Alabama was built at the Birkenhead shipyard of the Laird Brothers. However, British government minsters got wind of what was going on, and ordered that she be detained in the ship yard. But she defiantly slipped anchor and sailed quietly out into the Atlantic bound for the Azores where she was armed. She was now ready to fight for the Confederates
As soon as he heard the bad news Lincoln issued the order to "Sink the Alabama".... an order that was echoed some 80 years later when another great leader, Winston Churchill, was informed that the German battleship the Bismark had slipped out into the Atlantic to wreak havoc on allied merchant shipping. The Bismark was sunk before she could get into her stride. Not so the Alabama.
In the two years of her destructive life she roamed free from Newfoundland to the Carribean, sinking more than $ 4m of Union shipping. But in 1864 she famously met the USS Kearsage off the coast of Cherbourg , and after a spectacular battle she was sunk.
Despite this it was not until the end of the American Civil War that full cotton production restarted. But the whole episode sounded a distant death knell. In the next hundred years the centre of cotton production would shift to other parts of the world, most notably India. In the latter half of the 20th century Lancashire's famous indusrial landscape changed. The tall factory chimneys have been felled, the weaving sheds are demolished, apart from a few still preserved as working museums.
King Cotton has moved on.
