In Our Time - The Lancashire Cotton Famine

Episode Date: May 14, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cotton Famine in Lancashire from 1861-65. The Famine followed the blockade of Confederate Southern ports during the American Civil War which stopped the flow of cotton into mills in Britain and Europe. Reports at the time told of starvation, mass unemployment and migration. Abraham Lincoln wrote, "I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis." While the full cause and extent of the Famine in Lancashire are disputed, the consequences of this and the cotton blockade were far reaching.WithLawrence Goldman Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of LondonEmma Griffin Professor of History at the University of East AngliaAndDavid Brown Senior Lecturer in American Studies at University of ManchesterProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1863 in the middle of the American Civil War, President Lincoln wrote, I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working men of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism. which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.

He was replying to a letter from Manchester workers who had urged him to fight the Confederates, abolished slavery and continued the blockade of the cotton trade which had closed mills in Northern England and left hundreds of thousands of workers unemployed and in need of soup kitchens and unprecedented relief, but they held on. The blockade had led to what's called the Lancashire Cotton Famine,

a defining episode in World Trade and British Social History. With me to discuss the Lancashire Cotton Famine are Lawrence Goldman, Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, Emma Griffin, Professor of History at the University of East Anglia, and David Brown, Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. Lawrence Goldman, how important was the textile industry to Britain at that time in 1860s? Very important. The production of cotton textiles in factories had begun in Britain in the 1770s in a small way.

But by the early 19th century, it had transferred to Manchester and the towns of Lancashire spinning to the south of Manchester, weaving to the north. And by 1861, the year that the American Civil War begins, it was estimated that there were two and a half thousand cotton factories at work in Lancashire. They employed, and we know this actually quite in detail, 430,000 hands. Interestingly, a majority of those were women. And it was estimated that those 430,000 people directly employed were doubled by people who depended upon cotton for their livelihood. They might be dockers or stevedores bringing in the raw cotton. They might be retailers or merchants and so forth. So something like a million people depend upon cotton.

And then if you think of their dependence, the economist, famous journal of that period, said four million people depended for their livelihoods. in England and Wales out of a population of 20 million at that time. And this was a huge industry at the time, when it could be claimed that Manchester was the centre of a global industry, perhaps the leading global industry in the world. Absolutely. It was known as Cottonopolis. It was known as Cottonopolis. It was the kind of shock city of the Industrial Revolution,

but some could see in it a great charm. It was the Athens of the North as well. and one can see actually one can see the importance of cotton just looking at really the two cities which are crucial both Liverpool which is the place where the raw cotton comes in and also the Finnish goods go out of the port and Manchester had grown from really quite smallish beginnings

less than 100,000 in 1800 in both cities to over half a million by 1860 How reliant was the textile industry on this cotton from the southern states of America? Very much so. roughly 75% of all the raw cotton that is turned into cotton textiles in Lancashire comes from America. And America produces the best quality cotton. The best quality depends upon long staples, long fibres from the cotton plant.

And in America you have the right climatic conditions to grow a lot of this very high quality cotton. So all the very best cotton, the sea island cotton as it's called, comes from America. and the vast bulk of the rest of it also from America. And of course, cotton plantations are spreading out across the south through the early 19th century as places like Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana are turned over to cotton. And something like half of the 4 million black slaves

who are enslaved in the American South in 1860 are engaged in the production of cotton, about 1.8 million slaves. And these were interdependent, weren't they? The cotton industry grew as Manchester grew. Absolutely. All over the world there is a demand for cotton textiles. It's a very versatile cloth. It's easily kept clean.

You can wash it and so forth. It booms across the globe. And so there's this remarkable system, almost a globalised system of trade. Cotton being moved from the deep south, from the interior, by trains, which are of course a product of the Industrial Revolution, to the American ports, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans out across the Atlantic, not only to Lancashire, but to France and also increasingly the Rhineland as well. There the cotton textiles are made and then the cotton textiles are exported all over the globe as far as India and so forth.

Emma Griffin, let's stick to this country where, as Lawrence has said, upwards of a million people one way or another were engaged in it. and we had this great exchange in Manchester, which was, again, the biggest hole in the world of its kind, and so on. Who are the people working in the cotton industry? Well, in Lancashire, everybody's working in the mills. Some of these mill towns have, the vast majority of the population are working in the mills,

and whole families will be employed. So they offer a lot of employment for children. Children can start working from the age of nine. Now, they're not going to be doing very skilled work or operating the machines, but they'll be doing menial work around the factory. And as they enter their teens, they'll start to become machine operators. As Lawrence has already mentioned, and quite unusually,

there's a lot of employment for women, and in many mills women will actually outnumber the men. But all of the tasks within a factory are usually divided up according to gender. And, of course, it would be no great surprise to hear that women tended to have the lower-paid jobs, whilst men were the, had the more senior positions, the overlookers, the engineering and the heaviest work. That always came with the greatest pay and, of course, with the greatest status. I think one thing that is important to emphasise is that, I mean, we tend to think of factory workers low skill and low pay,

but for 19th century Britain, that simply isn't true at all. In the context of the time, and given that these are effectively uneducated workers, these workers are able to command a real premium for working in the factories. It is regarded as skilled work. These are valuable workers, and this is particularly true for the women. The other alternatives for them are things like domestic service or cleaning or laundry work. By contrast, the money that they can earn in the factories is very significantly better than the alternatives there. And the background of this is at the end of a village industry really,

the village cottage industry where everybody was at the loom if they weren't in the fields. It is. There's been a very significant switch in the way that things are made. So traditionally people are paid for making things according to how much. much is made. So a shoemaker gets paid for his shoes when he's made his shoes and it's not really paid for his time. He's made for what he actually accomplishes. In the factories, that logic doesn't really work because the employers have spent money invested in very expensive machinery. And that means they've got to keep their machines running all through the week as long as possible. So they've got to get the workers to the factory early in the morning. They've got to get

them working intensively throughout the day, staying until late into the evening. And that's a very different kind of working pattern that's being introduced. So instead of people dovetailing, working at home with managing a cotton garden or something, now they're going into the factories. And it's the beginning of modern working patterns that we're familiar with, where we're effectively paid for our time

rather than for what we managed to get done. But there was a preference for people to work in the factories rather than to stay in the countryside in these not idyllic villages and lousy conditions. There's a real draw. I mean, it's clear that population is moving into Lancashire. So workers are very clearly, I mean, there are some

push factors from the rural sector as well, but there are clearly attractions to working in the factories. And one of the attractions is that there's a lot of employment for children. So if you imagine a family in rural Norfolk of five or six children, many of those children won't be a work because there is no work for them to do. You make the move to somewhere like Manchester or one of the mill towns all round about. And suddenly all of your family is at work. So you go from having one breadwinner to having four or five way journey in your family which makes a very significant difference to living standards

indeed. So yes we've got basically since the end of the 18th century we've got rural migration into the towns, whole families are moving and taking up these new opportunities. Now David Brown and anti-slavery is going to slavery and anti-slavery going to enter into this discussion

what was the slavery mood if it's a useful word in Britain in about 1860? Well the abolitionist movement in Britain in the 19th century is one of the great success stories and perhaps the success story of British social history, resulting in the abolition of the international slave trade in 1807 and Caribbean emancipation in the 1830s. Now obviously after that point, after the movement has succeeded and achieved its goals, there's a reorganisation. And at one point historians would tell you that the movement had essentially run out of steam.

But I think the story now is that British abolition has, is remarkably adaptable, that it refocuses its goals on American slavery. There's a very strong transatlantic link with American abolitionists, forming a union across the Atlantic to pressurize the South. Uncle Tom's cabin in 1852 has a huge impact in Great Britain and revives abolitionist societies and increases membership. It's adapted on the stage. It's everywhere in British newspapers.

African-American speakers regularly to Britain in the 1840s and the 1850s, they receive a rapturous reception as they describe it, and they have a strong influence on British abolitionist attitudes. So at the beginning of the war in 1861, anti-slavery is in a healthy position. What knowledge would you say that there was in this country about the slave trade in the South of America, about the Confederates and the... Most Britons got their knowledge from sources such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, from reports in the press which emphasised the breakup of slave families,

the long working hours, the terrible conditions that slaves endured. A more informed view came from those African-American speakers. There was a large pamphlet. Many pamphlets were circulated. The press reported those meetings. So I think there was a fairly deep knowledge of slavery, within Britain in the 1850s. It might be superficial in some respects, but it certainly emphasised the worst aspects of cotton slavery.

And so we had newspaper, did we have newspaper reports? Was it an outrage, was it expressed in terms of this is still an outrage going on, although we've done what we've done? There is a disjuncture, isn't there, that Britain is receiving cotton in such great quantities, essentially maintaining plantation slavery, yet fails to recognize their part in that role. I think there is an outrage.

I think newspapers are very interested in the American story. They're also interested in the legacy of Caribbean emancipation, of course. And so slavery remains a very prominent topic in the British press in the 1850s. You mentioned these people going on tour. Douglas was one of them, for instance, and there were several. You say rapture's reception. They spoke in public hall and public meeting places. They spoke in large cities and small towns.

They receive large audiences wherever they went. Frederick Douglass, most of these speakers are ex-slaves or fugitive slaves. Douglas comes to Britain in 1845, partly to avoid the possibility of recapture. Some of the more noted fugitive slaves in Britain in the 1850s, one would be Henry Box Brown, slave who mailed himself in a parcel from Richmond to Philadelphia to freedom. who would recreate his escapade, his escape, and arrive on the lecture hall in a box and would emerge after about five minutes.

And then present his evaluation of his time as a slave. And that had an authenticity for British audiences that they were hearing firsthand from those who had endured the misery of slavery. Lawrence Goldman, why was the Confederate South so confident that Britain and Europe, but mostly in Britain, would support their decision that if they stopped cotton going to this country, mainly this country,

this country would crumble, it would cry, oh, let's support the confederate so it can have the cotton back. Why were they so confident of that? Well, there's a phrase which they used in the 1850s, King Cotton, or Cotton is King. And it goes back to a number of speeches made by a South Carolinian, a Senator Henry Hammond. who said that cotton is king and Britain could not, as a civilization, continue if the cotton supply across the Atlantic stopped. So many people depend upon it that civilization itself would collapse in Britain, and it was a miscalculation.

But the South believed it. What evidence did they have, Lauren? Well, and not a great deal. I mean, I don't think they fully understood the complexity and indeed the diversity of the British economy. but then they didn't also reckon upon, as it were, the story which will be focusing on in a moment, which is the way in which workers responded, and indeed the nation responded to the embargo on cotton. And what's interesting in the South is that this is very widely believed. It's not just the Confederate government which emerges in 1861 under its president Jefferson Davis when the South secedes.

The determination to make, as it were, Britain pay through stopping. the cotton flowing comes spontaneously. People cease to market their cotton in 1861 in the American South, following on from this idea that this is the way they might win the American Civil War. Because if they stop the cotton flowing, Britain will have to intervene in the American Civil War. The Union Navy has blockaded southern ports to prevent the cotton from getting out across the Atlantic. what the Confederate government wants is that Britain will break that blockade they will recognise the Confederacy

they will start to trade with the Confederacy and in that way as it were Britain will come in on the side of the South shall be forced to for economic reasons that's a it's a heck of a speculation it's a heck you see they could have done it a different way what they could have tried to do is to take the cotton

break themselves the blockade run the blockade get the cotton to Europe, sell it in European markets, and then use the proceeds to buy ammunition, boots, uniforms, because they have a very real problem. All the industrial production in America is in the north.

The South is an agricultural region growing staple crops, and therefore they need to get industrial material in, but they choose the embargo route. They choose not to market the cotton, and there are many photographs of bales of cotton rotting on dock sides

in the South. Emma Griffin, what was the immediate impact of the cotton embargo on the mills in the north-west of England? Yes, well, I mean, initially it doesn't have a very powerful effect because 1861 has been a very good year for the cotton crop. The Americans are aware of the trouble that are brewing, so they're very effective at trying to get as much of the cotton exported as they can. Excuse me. So most of the crop gets through in 1861, and the Lancashire Cotton,

industry makes do with what it's got right up until Christmas. They're also aware in the area that they have, that they're very reliant on one region's cotton crop, and of course this makes them vulnerable. So cotton manufacturers and merchants have been stockpiling cotton anyway. They like to have cotton in reserve because they are aware of this vulnerability that they've got. So the problems aren't very acute through most of 1861,

but as we enter into 1862 and the next year's harvest fails to come through, that's when the problems really start to emerge. All through 1862, well into 1863, not nearly enough cost and is entering the district, and that's when the factories start to go on to short time working, and eventually many, many people are made unemployed. So at the very end of 1863 and moving into 1864,

that the supplies improve again, and that's when things start to pick up. Yeah, but there's a period of a couple of years where mills are closing hundreds of thousands of people, literally unemployed. There's encouragement to migrate on the long. one hand encouragement to stay on the other hand because there's so many skilled workers.

I hope we'll come to that in a minute. David Brown, Lincoln's letter to the working men, and he wrote man, but given what Emma said about employing so many women, but there we go, that's then, Manchester on New Year's Eve 1862. What do you think, it's an extraordinary thing for a president to do in the middle of a war to write back to a letter from men in the free trade halls.

It's in Manchester, where they sent it to him on New York. So, what led him to do you think? Well, interestingly, on the terminology, it's Lincoln who describes the working men of Manchester. They describe themselves in their address as citizens of Manchester, not, you know, including men and women. It is an extraordinary move by Lincoln at one of the busiest periods of his presidency. One has to understand that emancipation was extremely unpopular in the United States. There were many in the northern states who did not support Lincoln's policy. And I suspect he was writing back to the folks.

in Manchester in order to galvanise that support. Certainly American newspaper editorials suggested that if the workers of Lancashire and Manchester in particular at a time of immense distress and suffering can support emancipation for good moral reasons, then so should the rest of the United States. Can we rummage around in those good moral reasons for a moment or two? It is almost like a sort of medieval play, isn't it really good? against ban, sort of morality against the evil of economics,

and good triumphs in a way, I'm a very good way here. So what's the mood? What are people doing? Because people are out of work, some of them are starving, many of them are having to move back to villages, streets are boarded up, there are plenty of reports of that. There's the Lancashire lad who writes his stuff, and people are

inflating it, but not much. It's a terrible time for hundreds of thousands of people. With at that moment no prospect. So I put it rather crudely, can you refine that? It is a difficult time. There is a large literature in the press. There are songs, there are poems written about the distress in Lancashire.

One wonders what these people are going to do in such terrible circumstances. But there does seem to be a moral commitment, an underlying moral commitment that whilst negotiations with the Confederacy might be advantageous on one hand in bringing cotton back and reopening the mills. On the other hand, most mill workers, most working folk in Lancashire are not going to ally themselves with a slave

power. Slavery's underwrites the Confederate Constitution in March 1861. It's explicitly written into the Confederate politics and society and thus this is a huge stumbling balk

for gaining support. The interesting thing, one interesting is Lawrence, about this is that the workers, well, that's extraordinary but the millowners, unitarians, liberal, very rich, very self-made, but they are against slavery too, and they pile in on the side of the workers. Yes, I mean, they, in a sense, have long been anti-slavery because of, in a sense, their politics and their religion as well.

The classic Manchester mill owner is a radical liberal and probably also a non-conformist as well. a unitarian or a congregation list and many of them have a long kind of pedigree of supporting anti-slavery. You take someone like John Bright, who's almost a classic example of this. It's Bright who puts up a quarter

of the cost of purchasing Frederick Douglass's freedom when he's in Britain. When he's in Britain at one point, there is a collection made by the British to purchase his freedom from his official owner, and the South, Bright is at the head of that and he's exactly the kind of person, a radical liberal, in favour

of freedom, freedom for all, in favour of free labour, contract labour, not slave labour. How much was it religious driven this abolition still in 1861? I think very largely. I mean, it would be wrong simply to say

it was a non-conformist movement, but slavery or anti-slavery in this country had come out of evangelists, Christianity and it was largely a non-conformist form of evangelicalism, though there were plenty of Anglicans as well who also supported it. If one goes back to the origins of anti-slavery in this country and indeed to the origins of anti-slavery in America, it comes out of evangelical Christianity in the early 19th century. And these are the kinds of people, these non-conformists in Lancashire, middle class, people who've made money but nevertheless remember their roots, who are strongly supportive of anti-slai

and they provide, in fact, the resource. What impact did this have on the government of the day? Had they been tempted to intervene in the civil war? Were they seduced by intervening? Could they say advantages and did this stop them? It's an interesting point. The government in Britain is led by Palmerston. He is Prime Minister.

And the Cabinet watches this very carefully, particularly in the autumn of 1862, when the cabinet discuss on several occasions whether to intervene in the civil war. There are arguments that Lancashire needs the cotton, of course. There are also humanitarian arguments because this is becoming a very long war, it's a very hard war, it's a very bloody war, and there are calls that Britain should use its good offices to bring the two sides together. Now, the cabinet is split and it's rather interesting.

In many ways, the heavyweights in the cabinet. Palmerston, the Prime Minister, Russell, the Foreign Secretary, Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, all very famous figures, all Prime Ministers eventually in their own time, have some sympathy with the South. It's a landed society, an aristocracy, like in a sense their own aristocracy. And they have some sympathy with the position of the South, but more radical figures in the Cabinet are opposed to breaking the blockade, intervening and recognising the Confederacy. Now, in a sense, Britain has to watch the war very carefully. You wouldn't want to intervene in a civil war

and come in on the wrong side, the losing side. And two battles are crucial in this, the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862 and then Gettysburg in 1863, because they show the British Cabinet that the Confederacy is not going to win this war. It may take time for the North to win, but it's not going to happen very quickly.

Can we come back to the workers, Emma, in Lancashire. What arranged, were there any arrangements in place to help them to, they stopped working, stopped getting any wages? A few of them had saved up a bit because of the highly skilled workers, but not many and not much. So what happened? Well, I mean, initially, everybody thinks it's going to be a short conflict. So as these problems start to emerge, the employers, the employers don't want to see

what is a skilled workforce being dispersed by what they hope will be a temporary disruption in their cotton supplies. So at first they will start putting their workers onto short weeks and holding onto as many as possible. When this fails, they might start trying to use cotton from elsewhere in the world. As Lawrence said earlier, 25% of the cotton imports are still coming from elsewhere, so they'll try and get more cotton and work with that. That's not an option for all mill owners because not all cotton can be used in all machines, but they'll exploit that as far as they can.

Workers themselves have their own different strategies. Again, of course, we have to remember that they are quite skilled, workers. So as employment starts to dry up, they've got a buffer that they can live on for a short period of time and as you've got whole households working if you can keep just one person in employment that can be enough to keep your household afloat.

But as things really start to bite as we move in through 1862 these strategies of course prove to be insufficient and at that point we have the emergence of big funds that are set up in order to disperse relief. So this is very similar to us donating to an earthquake

appeal or something today. So this is a exactly what they're doing at this time and they're mobilising quite, you know, collecting really very large sums to distribute. The other thing, of course, that's available is the poor law. Now, the poor law was never designed to cope with very large numbers

of skilled, unemployed workers, but it is the traditional mechanism for handing out relief and resources to those people who are desperately in need, and it is also brought into operation here as well, of course. But inadequate, and so it has to be reformed or elasticated, hasn't it?

It has to be elasticated really The poor law I mean the idea behind the poor law is that you either work and if you don't work I'm willing to work you either have to be put to work but obviously there is no work

you can't make work schemes on this kind of scale I mean stone breaking and things like that there just aren't enough stones that need to be broken or you put them into the workhouse there's nowhere near enough workhouse capacity for these kinds of numbers But they do find ways to they built municipal parks

a lot of which are still existing and the public works of different sorts. That is exactly the direction that we start to move in. So they're not actually doing this in 1862 and in 1863, but the need has been recognised. In 1864, the Public Works Act is passed, and that allows local authorities for the first time to borrow money precisely that they can build sewers

or build public parks, and it's the kind of the start of a new way of trying to deal with unemployment where you put your unemployed people to work on something that's useful to you as a government. David Brown, how much support was there for the Confederacy in Lancashire itself? And let's hone in on Liverpool. Well, Liverpool, excuse me, has been described as the most pro-Confederate city outside of the Confederacy itself.

And undoubtedly, there is a large group, pro-Confederate group there. Lancashire is a battleground. both union and Confederate representatives seek to influence and take advantage of the misery of the cotton famine and use it for their own purposes to force the government to intervene on one side or the other. In Liverpool itself, those most closely connected to the transatlantic cotton trade for obvious reasons had a vested interest in the Confederacy succeeding and the cotton supplies being reopened.

So I think there is a sense. small minority who are ideologically committed to the Confederacy, many of those being native southerners themselves, there are more southerners in Liverpool than there are in any other part of Britain. It's the British end of that transatlantic trade. So cotton factors have offices in Charleston and in Liverpool. Does that conflict, as it were, between Liverpool and Manchester show itself? It does show itself. There are various organisations formed. the Southern Independence Association is the main pro-confederate group. The Manchester Union and Emancipation Society are their main opponents,

and both of these groups slug it out in the summer of 1862 in particular, into 1863, each holding meetings in local towns seeking to sway public opinion. Lawrence Goldman, we've talked about the decision not to go for military intervention because they're back the losing side, that's what came to then. But how much did the British stand? to lose financially and how much were they losing financially? Well, you've just asked a question about Liverpool. Now we need to think about London

because this is a very diversified economy and it's not just about Lancashire because there are other interests involved here as well. If you ask the question, who built America in the 19th century, you could well say the answer is the city of London. America was the preferred destination for investments from Britain, the export of British capital in the 19th century. more went to America than anywhere else.

It was a very good bet to help build Chicago. So banks and investment houses have an enormous amount invested in the American future, and largely that is the north. And so although we think about Lancashire and its cotton interests, the city of London has great interests as well. And their fear, their very considerable fear, is that if Britain were to come in on the side of the Confederacy, then the loans would be lost.

There would be defaults on the loans. The federal government would instruct all its agencies to break with Britain. Private businesses likewise, and millions would be lost. And so there's a countervailing force in London as well. It's a much more complicated situation. And there's also another commodity that's coming across the Atlantic, which is foodstuffs, wheat. Something like 30 or 40% of the wheat that we're concerned, consuming in Britain in the 1860s is coming from the United States.

And that's another consideration as well, because the North controls that. The wheatlands are in the North, not in the South. So it's a complicated economic situation. Yeah, I think we can add to that, of course, Britain has other industries. We have ammunition, we have gun making in Birmingham and the Black Country. We have shipbuilding in the North West, and we also have a very developed merchant marine. So there are all sorts of other ways in which we are benefiting, industry and other parts of Britain are benefiting from the Civil War

because we're making things that the North in particular are buying and are prepared to pay premium for. So it's not all, even if we think just about industry, it's a story of two halves. But scanning the landscape for those two or three years, the numbers of people out of work, the desperation that clearly was great hunger, the public riots were very few and minor. Absolutely. And I think again we have to bear in mind

that this area in Lancashire is a very, in relative terms, it's a wealthy and very settled region. So when trouble starts to bite, these families aren't thrown into utter destitution very rapidly. There's quite a big buffer that they can kind of work through and there's all sorts of resources in the region

that prevent this ending in mass starvation or anything like that. Of course, it's massive hardship, but there's not an awful lot of rioting. And the only real exception to that is in Staley Bridge in 1863, where the crowds do descend into the street. We don't quite know how many people are involved because we've just got conflicting newspaper reports, but it sounds like a few thousand in the streets.

And they are starting to object because the relief fund in the town have made two changes. They're going to offer less relief per unemployed worker per week from now on, but they're also changing the terms in which it's going to be given. So instead of giving it as cash, they want to give it as a ticket because they're concerned that people are taking the cash and then spending the money down at the pub instead of on the bread that they're supposed to be needing so badly. So it's these double changes that lead to a lot of disorder in the street, throwing of stones,

at those people who involve the policy makers, houses and so on. But in the scheme of things, I think you'd all agree it was a small, small beer, would you agree? David Brown, when did the South's cotton diplomacy begin to go wrong? When did they realise we were misguided? And what did they try to do about it? I don't think it ever went right.

So from a very early point, there were many. There were conflicting views within Jefferson Davis's Confederate Cabinet about the policy. By 1862, when they began to relax the cotton embargoes,

and begin to think that we ought to be selling this cotton because to trade for the goods that Lawrence described. Of course, Lincoln's blockade by that point has become effective and it's actually preventing ships from crossing the Atlantic. You know, the policy is naive, if not foolish. And the idea that the British government is going to give in to what they perceive to be blackmail frankly shows the diplomatic inexperience of the Confederate cabinet who were, after all, beginning from scratch in 1861.

They had very little international diplomatic experience. Lawrence Goldman, the cotton famine stopped with the end of the American Civil War. What was the state of the American cotton trade at that time? Well, it had more or less, I wouldn't say come to a halt, but you have a devastated South. I mean, the war is one not just, on the battlefields, but it's won by invading the South and taking over

the whole of the South. That's what happens in 1864 and 1865. The plantations are often abandoned. The slaves have run away. They've tried to join Union Army lines. They're not being cultivated. The transportation system has

collapsed. The cotton factors have gone. These were people who were based in the major port cities. They advanced capital to the masters to the cotton growers and they organised the trade across the Atlantic, but they've disappeared by 1862, completely gone. So you have to rebuild the southern economy from scratch. And actually there are many Britain's commercial, as it were, representatives who go over and report on the state of

the southern economy at this time. How quickly are we going to get the cotton again? And it takes time. There's no cash in the South because all Confederate currency is worthless once the war is over. are very few dollar bills in circulation. You can't pay people. Getting the economy going again is going to be very difficult. And of course, you've lost a slave labour force as well, because the slaves are free. And over time, over a period of years, a new labour system emerges in the South based upon sharecropping, where, as it were, the landowner, parcels out the land, black families work it on 40 acres, the crop is sold at the end of the season, and they share the proceeds. And this is, although historians debate it, a rather an efficient way of

approaching the problem of growing staples. So it's going to take time. Amma, what impact did the famine have on the system of social relief in Britain? Well, I think like a lot of what's happening with the American Civil War in Britain, it's really a story of two halves. So there are some things that change and there are some things that stay the same. I think the really significant development is what I was talking about a moment ago with the development of the Public Works Act. Disability councils now have, or local authorities now have, to borrow money and to set unemployed people to work. Though again, that doesn't happen until 1864, so it's a little bit, it's not really effective during the kind of the crisis years here in Lancashire. With respect to the

poor law, nothing really changes. So the idea behind the poor law remained the fact that either you work and if you aren't able to work at your normal trade the poor law will put you to some meaningless and very menial work like stone breaking or you go into the workhouse and that remains the idea behind the poor law there's no really significant reforms there until the 20th century so it's a story of two halves some things change but some things really don't change very significantly at all can you give us any idea how many you've talked about was it 2000 mills and how many of those mills have closed down well I think one other

change that happens at this time is, I mean, it's the survival of the fittest. So the smallest mills, those that are dependent on older technology, are the ones that are unlikely to survive these traumatic years of 1862 and 1863. So several hundred mills certainly do close down. And what we tend to see is it's the newer, the more developed, the larger mills that emerge unscathed from the crisis. So I think one of the other things that happens in the area is a certain streamlining of the cotton industry. David Brown, how did the global cotton trade change as a result of this famine? Dramatically.

The boost given to competitors who were really in no way or form competitors to the American South in the 1850s is immense. There's a rush to find alternative supplies of cotton in Brazil, in Egypt, but most notably in India where large acreages of formerly uncultivated or farming land is put to cotton production, bringing in people who are formerly peasants or subsistence farmers or in manufacturing households into the web of debt that Lawrence describes whereby they face coercive practices in terms of producing cotton where they are largely controlled by merchants and landowners. So it kick-started industries in places like India and Egypt?

Very much so. And one of the interesting things about it is that actually, with new cotton coming on stream from these lands and then the South eventually getting its act together and producing cotton, there is more cotton in the late 19th century world than ever before. And the result of that is that the price goes down. And as the price goes down, all the southern producers of cotton in America

just go and plant more cotton to try to make up their income, producing, as it were, further deflation of the price. It's a great time to be a cotton consumer. It's a great time to buy cotton goods. But actually, the effect of all of this is to reduce the price worldwide. There's a theory, there's an idea, that this Lancashire-Gotten famine sped up the movement for the vote, especially among working men.

What credence to give to that, Emma? Well, I mean, obviously, chartersome has failed in the 1840s and the 1850s, and the 1860s, our working men still do. don't have what it is that they were fighting for, which is a vote for adult male suffrage, along with a host of other things. Arguably, one thing that the, because there's so little in the way of disorder and writing, I think what historians have suggested is that it shows the maturity and the maturity and the trustworthiness of the working men.

So historians have certainly gone from this to suggest that it's an important stepping stone to the Reform Act that come within a few decades. New word on that, David? Yes, well, William Gladstone in 1866 specifically mentions the stoic behaviour of Lancashire workers as strong evidence that they are reliable and should be given the vote. And finally, Lawrence, what's your take on this? Well, I think it's, if you look at the debate over the suffrages it develops in the early 19th century, the fear always is that if you give the vote to the workers, they will use it for their own immediate needs.

They will, as it were... Not anything that's happened before with people. That's right. If you give it to them, they'll only vote, as it were, in their own material interests. And what, as it were, the governing classes are looking for is, if you like evidence, that they have political wisdom and sophistication, that they can put, if you like, other interests first. And here is this example which those who favour extension of the suffrage, those who lead the suffrage movement, can turn to and say, look, here was an example of people thinking about others first.

and putting their interest second. Well, thank you very much. Hans Goldman, Emma Griffin and David Brown. Next week I'll be talking about Josephus, the author of the Jewish War in the first century AD, and thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I suppose you're going to say again what we should have talked about, haven't you? So what did we miss out? What were the big things we missed out? I thought at one point we were going to give the impression that the whole of Lancashire was pro-union but unfortunately we got in the fact that there was a strong Confederate presence. And I think, yes, it went through my head as we were talking

that in fact if you look at Britain as a whole, it's a very complicated picture and attempts to say that all workers were this and all the middle class were that. You didn't attempt to say that. No, no, precisely so. And you need to be, you know, like any foreign crisis, you know, think of Iraq or Afghanistan,

done, the nation divides, as it were, and in some sense it divides on sociology, but also it divides over the issues themselves, and people take sometimes unfamiliar or surprising positions. And we avoid being relevant in this programme, but the trivial thing is the country emerged, like the deep seat of the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester on the football pitch, right. Yeah, absolutely, but, yeah. Also, the self-servingness of the merchants, whereas we've got the work. has taken the moral cause and the merchants

just want to trade with whoever they can make money from. So you thought the merchants were, they weren't moved by the moral cause? I think far less. I think this seems to happen every time there's a war.

There are all sorts of people who see an opportunity to make a quick buck and those people who are in the business of trade and the buying and selling just move in. But on the other hand,

they were raising. There's always winners. There's always some business winners whenever there's a war. But they did raise funds, quite a lot of funds, didn't they? And they, in London,

raised funds for the Lancashire workers. Was that self- interest to talk as well, I don't know, you don't know. I think it was very important that that relief came to Lancashire in terms of relieving distress. The poor law, as Emma suggested, was hated by mill workers, proud, independent men who felt it humiliating to have to go before their local council. So, to have, and it came from America as well, of course. There was ships that arrived from America

bringing relief, flour, bacon, food, supplies. Yeah, and this is a skilled workforce that you need to protect. You can't just, you know, have them decimated. So there's a certain self-interest in all the, I mean, the factory owners themselves investing large sums into the relief schemes. It's a very interesting comment on the notion of being free, that ticketing was not accepted. Giving you a shilling was okay, but giving you a ticket for a shilling. But I suppose they felt that their self-respect was under attack. In a sense, you've given us money and now you don't think we're responsible enough to use the money, so you're giving us tickets.

down the century as well. Exactly. But it was probably also Redland of the way they used to pay them in the mines, which was the truck system, which again, the mine owners would give you a ticket to get your groceries from the mine owned grocery shop

and you didn't have any choice. Company store, exactly. So I suspect that it was all associated with being exploited and not being respected. But it is, it's a respect, it's stigmatising, exactly. And Simon Tillotson comes in, again... You tea or coffee, free. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free.

Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.