There’s a phrase that’s often bandied about with respect to the Marshall Scholarship: the “Special Relationship.” The pretense is that there is something exceptional in the Anglo-American relationship — something that ties our countries together beyond merely instrumental cooperation or historical circumstance. Wikipedia suggests that the existence of a special relationship was noted as early as the late nineteenth century but that the term’s popular invocation is linked to Churchill and his famously close ties to Franklin Roosevelt.
It’s to that period, too, that the Scholarship actually traces. George Marshall, the American general and later cabinet secretary, pointed to a war-torn Europe in the aftermath of World War II, warning of the breakdown of the “basis of modern civilization,” and he advocated for a massive aid program to rebuild the continent. That program — the Marshall Plan — was the proximate cause for the British government creating a scholarship program for Americans, and the British government named that new program after Marshall. The program was a gesture of good will and an effort to cement the Special Relationship.
The Marshall Plan is a nice story, but I want to point to a different, earlier origin story of what we might now call the Special Relationship. It’s a story that begins — eighty-five years before the advent of the Marshall Plan — in the North West England county of Lancashire.
Lancashire was a site of rapid modernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, and its textile industry centered in Lancashire — and more specifically, the cities of Manchester and Liverpool. Manchester, for example, grew from a small town of less than 10,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a city of around 89,000 by the end of that century, and further to a giant metropolis of 400,000 by 1851. Growth in manufacturing was breathtaking: the British textile industry used 22 million pounds of raw cotton in 1787; 52 million by 1800; and 588 million by 1850. Britain was the center of cotton processing around the world: in 1800, 95% of the world’s cotton spindles were in Britain, and even a century later, still a majority of cotton spindles (58%) were on the island. And in Britain, Lancashire — and specifically Manchester, known as “Cottonopolis” — was, in Hourani’s words from 1900, “the centre of the cotton industry . . . .”
That industry was heavily dependent on the American South. The historian W.O. Henderson, in 1932, noted that 78% of Lancashire’s cotton came from the American South by 1860. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 thus spurred an “unprecedented crisis” in the cotton industry, spelling disaster for the Mancunians. The New York Times, in a November 26, 1862 article, summarized the situation with an apt headline: “THE DISTRESS IN LANCASHIRE.” It went on to describe the “great domestic tragedy” of mass unemployment of cotton mill workers, with rippling effects throughout the Lancastrian economy: “[t]ailors, shoemakers, bakers, milliners, beerhouse-keepers,” and many others lost the primary sources of business as a result of the cotton shortage. Of the 360,751 cotton mill workers, the Times reported, only 58,638 were working full time, with 119,712 working part-time. Just over half (182,401) were entirely unemployed. And, the Times reported, “[t]he prospect darkens each day . . . . Business in the Manchester market is virtually at a stand-still . . . .” Soup kitchens and relief societies were created, but the relief they distributed, The Observer wrote in an April 27, 1862 article, “has been but as a drop in the ocean.” This disaster — what became known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine — would last through the end of the American Civil War into 1865.
It’s worth noting precisely why famine was brought on to Lancashire. The North had ordered a naval blockade of the South, attempting to starve its economy. But that blockade wasn’t fully successful (or so, at least, the Mancusians thought). After all, John Bright, a Member of Parliament, argued, the port of New Orleans, in 1863, wasn’t blockaded — cotton could reach Britain if Southerners really wanted it to. But, The Manchester Guardian records on February 4, 1863, Bright alleged that the South instead “burn[ed] the cotton that they may injure us, because they think we cannot live even for a year without their cotton, and that to get it we shall send ships of war, break the blockade, and make war upon the North, and assist the slave-owners to obtain their independence.”
There’s some basis for this logic. The conventional reasoning of Southerners regarding the international ramifications of the Civil War traced to a 1858 speech by Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. On the Senate floor, he argued that the South, “[w]ithout firing a gun, without drawing a sword,” could “bring the whole world to our feet.” If the South were to withdraw its cotton crop from the world, Hammond thought, “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South.” Cotton from the South was so integral to the global economy that “[n]o power on earth dares to make war upon it.” Hammond concluded with a famous phrase that would reverberate throughout Southern politics in this era: “Cotton is king.”
And indeed, there were certainly sympathizers with the South among the Lancashire folks, those workers and factory owners who suffered from the collapse of this global industry. Moreover, among the elites of Britain, opinion was divided; many of the London gentry, for example, saw the Southern aristocrats — those fellow landowners occupying the upper echelons of society — as their peers. In February 16, 1863, the New York Times described the UK government’s policy toward the Civil War as “that of a careful neutrality, with Southern sympathies.”
It’s in this context — widespread economic despair among the Lancashire working-class and a divided public tinged with Southern sympathy — that the workers of Manchester gathered on December 31, 1862 — on the eve of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. They assembled, noted one J.C. Edwards, because some in Britain saw it fit to “laud the conduct of the Southern slaveholders in their secession movement, and to disguise the fact that the South rebelled to conserve, perpetuate, and extend slavery, and that in fact slavery was the sole cause of the present Civil War . . . .” Indeed, Edward Hoosen added, the local paper — the Manchester Guardian (which would become today’s Guardian) — expressed pro-slavery sentiments on behalf of Lancashire, and so the working people of Manchester came together “to set themselves right with the world.” The outcome of that meeting was a remarkable letter sent to Abraham Lincoln from “the citizens of Manchester assembled at the Free Trade Hall.” (That they used the term “citizens” is relevant, for many women would’ve been among the Mancusian workforce and at this meeting.)
Their letter begins and ends with the relationship between Britain and the United States — a relationship, they wrote, founded on a shared heritage of “orderly and legal freedom.” The citizens of Manchester, they explained, “rejoice in your greatness as an out-growth of England whose blood and language you share,” but “[o]ne thing alone has . . . lessened our sympathy with your country”: the presence and growth of Black enslavement.
They “joyfully honour[ed]” the President and Congress for their “many decisive steps towards practically exemplifying [their] belief in the words of [their] great founders, ‘all men are created free and equal.’” But they didn’t just write platitudes. Rather, they carefully noted the incrementals steps that Lincoln and Congress had taken toward emancipation: how Lincoln had emancipated slaves in D.C.; prevented impressing captured slaves into naval service; agreed to receive ambassadors “from the negro Republics of Hayti and Liberia, thus for ever renouncing that unworthy prejudice which refuses the rights of humanity to men and women on account of their colour”; made a treaty with Britain to help enforce their bans on the slave trade; banned slavery from U.S. territories; offered money for states who were electing to emancipate slaves; and banned generals from sending fugitive slaves back to their masters. Lincoln, in the Mancusians’ words, “entreated slave masters to accept these moderate offers,” and, upon having waited “long and patient[ly],” finally took the step to issue the broader Emancipation Proclamation.
Here, too, the Manchester citizens evinced a clear-eyed understanding of the situation. Lincoln’s choice to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on the next day would only create “unconditional freedom for the slaves of the rebel states.” Such an action, for the Manchester citizens, was a “humane and righteous course.” But they noted further: “We assume that you cannot now stop short of a complete unrooting of slavery.” They referred to “broad principles of humanity which must guide you”: “[H]uman beings should not be counted as chattels. Women must have the right of chastity and of maternity, men the rights of husbands, masters the liberty of manumission. Justice demands for the black no less than for the white the protection of laws—that his voice be heard in your courts.” They urged Lincoln, in short, “not to faint in your Providential Mission. . . . Leave no root of bitterness to spring up and work fresh misery to your children.” Fully eradicating slavery, they argued, would constitute a “glorious consummation” that would “cement Great Britain and the United States in close and enduring regards.” In moving a resolution to send the letter, Dr. J. Watts expressed an “earnest hope that England and America may ever remain knit together in the most intimate fraternal bonds.”
Two aspects of the letter are particularly evocative for me. First, the letter is remarkably incisive. Though it is filled with soaring rhetoric, it is quite concrete about what has happened — and what hasn’t. Even today, we sometimes confuse the Emancipation Proclamation for an order to free all slaves. That didn’t happen. Much more was required to fully eradicate slavery; indeed, some would say that we’ve failed to do so today with the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for forced labor as punishment for a crime. My old political theory professor once noted that some kind of distance helps with enabling clear understanding. It’s why, in her example, friends usually can tell better than you can when your relationship to a significant other is toxic. Here, I think the citizens of Manchester more clearly understood what was at stake and what still had to be done than many Americans do today — both the triumphalists who celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation and the heroism of Lincoln as having freed all slaves and the deniers who claim the “War of Northern Aggression” primarily arose from constitutional concerns for states’ prerogatives.
Second, and relatedly, the letter exemplifies what I think is crucial in a good relationship: the holding of the other to account for shared ideals. A relationship founded on boosterism and niceties is closer to the relationship between a servant and master than that of equals. For it is when we are equal that we are exposed to each other’s scrutiny, to being held accountable for failing to live according to our ideals. The citizens of Manchester simultaneously lauded the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation as a “humane and righteous course” — Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial notes that the order immediately freed tens of thousands of slaves in Union-occupied Confederate lands and signaled Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation without providing monetary compensation or colonization — but admonished that he not give in. The Mancusians understood that living to shared ideals is a shared process — they acknowledged that there were “ill-wishers here” who “oppose liberty at home,” that there were many English citizens who favored the South over the North. In celebrating Lincoln and urging him to go further in the project of freedom, the Manchester citizens also took a stance in their own politics, urging their own Parliament to live according to its professed values. Indeed, four months later, the Manchester Emancipation Society, which was formed from that December 31 meeting, would bring a petition to the House of Commons condemning an English firm that built a warship for the Confederacy, arguing that it violated British law and morality.
Lincoln’s response was simple and elegant. When he assumed the presidency, Lincoln wrote, “one duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to maintain and preserve at once the constitution and the integrity of the Federal Republic.” Maintaining the Union was his purpose. In a kind of dodging of moral responsibility, he remarks that “[i]t is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem necessary for the public safety from time to time to adopt.” His purpose alone was to maintain the Union.
But he also came to understand that the fate of the Union was tied to the fate of slavery. The attempt of the Confederacy, he explained, was an “attempt to overthrow this Government which was built on the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of slavery . . . .” The Emancipation Proclamation signaled that truth; Foner quotes Frederick Douglass, who explained that with the Proclamation, “‘[t]he cause of the slaves and the cause of the country’ had become one.”
A war on slavery, Lincoln understood in a nod to King Cotton, would create great pressures for Europe to intervene on behalf of the South. The South, Lincoln wrote, thus subjected “the working men of Europe . . . to a severe trial for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt [i.e., secession].” And that trial was severe indeed. In his most eloquent and touching sentences, Lincoln wrote,
I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working men at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. . . . Under these circumstances 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. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.
These letters — from the citizens of Manchester, dated to the day before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln’s response, dated January 19, 1863 — would form, in Lincoln’s mind, “an augury that, whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be . . . perpetual.”
The story of the Manchester workers who banded together in support of the Union feels like a heroic tale of good against evil, of suffering for one’s righteous cause, of international and cross-racial worker solidarity in support of inalienable human rights.
We can, of course, complicate the story, as the main players themselves do. Looming over much of the conversation in England is the possibility of importing cotton from India — that imperial domain that hardly reflects the shining beacon of British liberty — and, of course, the Lancashire workers’ reliance, up until the Cotton Famine, on slave-produced American cotton. Moreover, many Lancashire workers did support the Confederacy; it’s by no means clear that there was mass support for the Union among the Lancashire workers (although it does seem clear that in Manchester there was strong Union support).
On the other side, Lincoln, of course, was no saint. His purpose, as he himself noted, was to protect the Union, not to eradicate slavery. He spent much of his life thinking about how to entice slave owners to voluntarily give up their slaves, about how to send freedpeople to Liberia for colonization. Whether these attributes are defining characteristics of these people — whether we ought to think of them as fundamentally sinful but having done some good or as fundamentally good with sinful blots on their reputations — is for us to individually decide. But this “interchange of sentiments,” as Lincoln described the letters, ought, I think, to be viewed as foundational to the Special Relationship. In recognizing each other’s sufferings and difficulties and in holding each other to account for making reality their shared ideals, I think Lincoln and the Manchester citizens’ letters reflect what we should aspire to out of a relationship.
Today, at least two full statues of Abraham Lincoln stand in the United Kingdom. One is present right outside of the Palace of Westminster, where Lincoln stands alongside British prime ministers, Mandela, Gandhi, Fawcett, and others. When preparing for this blog post, I decided to go for a run past his statue and grab a picture, which is below.
A second stands in Manchester, placed there due to the connection forged between the workers of Manchester and the President of the United States in 1863.
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Rose: London has begun reopening this last week, so one nice thing is that I got to go to the gym for the first time since December this last week. Fun times! I got a bit excited with exercising, and so on one of the off-days, I went for a run that was far too long for my body. On the positive side, I ended up running ten miles, and I got some pictures. On the negative side, I hurt my foot because — as I said — my body was not ready for that kind of run.
I also spent a long time on my dissertation and working out a theory section. As I’ve noted before, it’s fun work, although I’m getting less and less confident with the actual ideas as time passes and as I have more time to think about it.
I got a haircut on Wednesday (again a first since December!), and it was really nice to chat with a random person. My barber was a twenty-year-old guy who grew up in what he called a “small village” around twenty miles outside of London. It turns out he really likes talking about politics but rarely has the opportunity to do so (“they say to never talk politics in a barbershop,” he told me), so it was a fun conversation. I also went to the LSE library to get more books, and I found a book I had been trying to find for a while, which was a joy.
Bud: I heard back from LSE this week about my application for next year — I didn’t get in (not super surprising, but still a bit saddening), but that means I am for sure going to be in Manchester. And I am really eager to learn more about Manchester, especially after spending the last few days reading old newspapers about the Lancashire Cotton Famine. I’m a bit bummed about not being able to be with all the folks who will be in London next year, but I’m otherwise really excited to see Manchester.
Thorn: My foot has really been hurting due to that overly eager run, so that’s been an unfortunate development — especially because the weather is starting to look much better!
Gratitude: I’ve started doing Zoom sessions with a friend where we just sit on the video call and do work together. It’s a bit like when I’d used to go to the physics building at Pomona and do work alongside friends. It’s nice to have the solidarity and accountability, and I’m grateful to my friend for doing it with me.
Future topics: As I noted last week, I do want to return to the topic of meritocracy soon. Also, probably something about LBJ soon — this Caro book is fascinating.