IN 2017 the Co-op Group was presented with the Thomson-Reuters Stop Slavery award. 

This was made for its impressive work against modern-day slavery, winning praise for its Bright Futures programme which offers paid employment for slavery and trafficking victims.

I’m not sure if the founders of what had been the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) would have felt about this — pride no doubt that their values where still being upheld but shock that something they had fought against was still going on.

The CWS was formed in Manchester in 1863 almost in the middle of the American civil war. 

The trade mark of the society, the Wheatsheaf, includes the motto “Labor and Wait.” 

Note that Labor is the American spelling. It comes from the last line of the poem by US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Sill achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to Labor and to wait.

The use of this motto was a clear statement of the founders of the CWS of its support for the abolitionist cause during the civil war. 

The war had a huge effect on Manchester and the cotton districts in Lancashire and Yorkshire. 

In 1861 when the war began there where approximately half a million workers employed in the cotton industry of northern England. 

The huge wealth of Liverpool and “Cottonopolis,” as Manchester was known following Richard Arkwright’s development of the steam-driven textile mill, was based on mass production. 

By 1853 there where over 100 cotton mills in Greater Manchester, making it the world’s centre of cotton spinning.

In parallel with this technological development Manchester was also a centre of radical politics. 

In 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote: “Manchester is the seat of the most powerful unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers the most socialists.”

There is a strong historical continuity between Chartism the development of trade unions and the roots of co-operation in the strike committees formed in the 1840s to help members of artisan traders during industrial disputes.

When the American civil war began, initially sentiment among radicals was mixed. 

Given slavery was present across the United States, there was a split between those who supported the right of the Southern states to “secede” from the Union and the more radical supporters of full suffrage. 

Interestingly, the great free-trade liberal newspaper the Manchester Guardian took this former position, undoubtedly under pressure form the considerable cotton interests in the City. 

Prior to the civil war there had been an anti-slavery committee in Manchester that had raised money for the underground railway through which slaves could escape to free states. 

Many radicals in the cotton districts saw only too clearly the links between their own conditions and the conditions of those in slavery in the United States. 

Writing in the New York Daily Tribune on October 14 1861, Karl Marx wrote: “As long as the English cotton manufacturers depend on slave-grown cotton, it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on two-fold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black man on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Involved in this anti-slavery society was Edward Owen Greening (1836-1923), a Quaker who went on to become an important co-operator involved in the very first Co-operative Congress in 1869. 

There were at the time of the civil war 118 co-operative societies in the cotton districts. They had been gradually coming together to form a collective buying and wholesale operation. 

These discussions included two other key figures — Edward Hoosen, who came from Halifax, had little formal education but gained his outlook from the Chartist newspaper Northern Star and was “Manchester’s leading Chartist,” and John Charles Edwards, president of the Manchester and Salford Equitable Society. 

Both were to become original members of the Board of the CWS.

In April 1861 Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports, cutting off the supply of cotton. 

This had a devastating effect on the cotton districts. By November 1862, 330,759 cotton workers had been laid off and were seeking relief. 

We have an excellent record of what happened in the cotton districts because of the work of John Watts who was the secretary of the central relief committee during the famine and who complied a magisterial report of the famine published in 1866.

The loss of work and resulting famine had a devastating effect on many co-operative societies with many smaller ones going to the wall. 

They also suffered from the way the local Poor Law boards dealt with relief, forcing those seeking relief to give up their shareholdings in co-operative societies before they could get relief and even issuing relief tickets that could not be used in co-op stores.

In many ways these slights hardened the positions of both workers and co-operators, enhancing their support for the Union and accelerating progress towards the formation of the CWS to enhance the commercial strength of co-op societies.

This came to a head on New Year’s Eve 1862. The following day Lincoln had said that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states, “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

An advertisement appeared in the Manchester Guardian:

TONIGHT FREE-TRADE HALL
WORKINGMEN’S MEETING for Union and Freedom, and
to prepare an Address to President Lincoln.
Chair to be taken at seven o’clock. members of the committee to be at the Hall at half past five. 
Doors open at six.
J.C. Edwards Hon. Secretary

This meeting had been called by Hoosen and Edwards, who had raised the £30 to pay for the hall. Their call did not go unheeded. 

That night the Free Trade Hall was full to overflowing. Despite the hardship the blockade was causing, over 6,000 people packed inside. The Union and Emancipation Society was formed.

The first resolution of the meeting was moved by Edwards: “That this meeting, recognising the common brotherhood of mankind and the sacred and inalienable right of every human being to personal freedom and equal protection, records its detestation at negro slavery in America, and of the attempts of the rebellious Southern slaveholders to organise on the great American continent a nation having slavery as its base.”

Despite the Manchester Guardian’s detestation of Lincoln, it duly reported the proceedings of the evening in the next day’s newspaper.

The outcome of the gathering was a letter of solidarity from the working people of Manchester to Lincoln: “The erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity — chattel slavery — during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.”

Astonishingly on January 19 1863, Lincoln replied by sending an address to the working people of Manchester. 

He recognised their suffering as “an instance of sublime Christian heroism,” and added: “It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and the ultimate and universal triumph of justice humanity and freedom.”

This was followed in February by the first food relief ship from New York to Liverpool, the ship the George Griswold carried boxes of bacon and bread, bags of rice and corn and 15,000 barrels of flour and was greeted on the docks by a crowd of 4,000. This was the first of several relief ships.

Before the war ended the CWS had been formed and Edwards went on to be its first secretary and cashier. 

Sadly, although Hoosen became one of the founder members of the board of the CWS, he only lived to 1869 and was buried near Ernest Jones in Ardwick Cemetery. 

The Co-operative movement survived the American civil war. 

The Rochdale Society alone donated £1,500 towards unemployment relief, establishing soup kitchens and organising education workshops and activities. 

Watts, secretary of the relief committee, went into write for the Co-operative News.

In his famous History of the Rochdale Pioneers, George Jacob Holyoake wrote that “co-operative societies had no small share in enabling the people of the two great cotton-spinning counties to resist the recognition of a slave dominion.”

Today in the appropriately named Lincoln Square between Brazenose Street, Albert Square and Deansgate in Manchester is a statue of Abraham Lincoln. 

The inscription on the plinth says it is “dedicated to the support the working people of Manchester gave in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the American Civil War.” 

That’s one statue that should not be pulled down.