ON page 405 of the folio edition of the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln there is a letter dated January 19 1863. It is titled “To the Workingmen of Manchester, England” and 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 and to refuse 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 these very slave states.

Britain’s textile industry, centred in Lancashire, was the biggest in the world and prior to the US civil war imported three-quarters of all the cotton produced in the southern states.