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When Manchester textile workers stood against slavery and earned Lincoln’s gratitude
In this laudable age of Black Lives Matter, history reveals that there was a time in Britain when workers took a stand in solidarity with black lives that were suffering the ravages and evils of slavery thousands of miles away — and did so at considerable cost to themselves and their families.
On January 19 1863 US President Abraham Lincoln addressed an open letter ‘To the Workingmen of Manchester, England’, which begins: “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the address and resolutions which you have sent me on the eve of the new year.”
Lincoln here is referring to the decision of Manchester textile workers, arrived at after a tempestuous meeting at the city’s Free Trade Hall in late 1862, to continue to support the North’s blockade of the Atlantic ports of the Confederacy. The workers also refused to touch one bale of cotton picked by slaves in the the South should Lord Palmerston, Britain’s prime minister at the time, accede to the demands of British mill owners and shipping companies that he order the Royal Navy to smash the blockade by force in order to restore the fortunes of a British textile industry that was on its knees due to the lack of the cotton it relied on from the southern slave states.
