The Civil War News & Views Open Discussion Forum

Lancashire, U.K. View

Published in the Manchester Guardian (U.K.) on 13 May 1861

At the bottom of the present differences between the federal government and the Confederate States, there is one main commercial consideration. So long as the Union lasted, the Southern states stood in precisely the same relation to the Northern states as the old American colonists stood to Great Britain. The North supplied the South with everything upon which skilled labour had been employed, and the South paid for it in the slave-grown products of the soil.

To the North this arrangement has secured a great home market for every kind of commodity that New England could produce, and for every article of merchandise that New York could import. To the South the arrangement has been very different. A highly protective American tariff has enhanced the price of everything received by the South in exchange for its raw products and, while the population of the North has increased enormously, and every branch of Northern industry has been developed, the population of the South has remained unprogressive and planters, tradesmen and the population generally are as poor, as indolent, and as extravagant as they have always been.

The highest occupations in which Southerners could engage were the growth of cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar, and the breeding, buying, selling and working of an unfortunate race of human beings. Observation and reflection have long since convinced thoughtful Southern men that without secession no change could be introduced.

To the South the bonds of the union have been as burdensome as the fetters to the negro, whom the South has kept in hopeless bondage; and if the sentiments of the educated and higher classes of Southern society could find expression, we should be frankly told that in the emancipation of the South from dependence on the North, in the creation of diversity of employment for Southern capitalists and for the masses, and in the saving that would arise from direct Southern intercourse with Liverpool, Southampton and Havre, the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease.

When the war of the revolution severed the connection between England and the colonies, Massachusetts and New York were the South Carolina and Georgia of the time; and as the colonists began to supply themselves with manufactured articles England had before supplied, slavery in New England gradually expired. Why should the South be prevented from freeing itself from slavery? And why should not the monopoly which the Northern states seek to fasten on the South be broken down? The question of secession is one of humanity, and of freedom of trade.