Archive: Article from the 1860 London Times : Cotton and American Slavery (re-published in The New York Times Print archive in 1996)

About the Archive: Below is a digitized version of an article from The New York Times’ print archive before the start of online publication in 1996. The article was originally published by The London Times in 1860 and re-published in America’s New York Times entitled “Cotton and American Slavery.” To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, the New York Times does not alter, edit, or update them. (Posted, Compliments, DDay Media)

From the London Times. February 16, 1860

The importation of cotton into this country has, since the import duty was abolished, increased sixteen-fold. Having been 63,000,000 lbs., it is now 1,000,000,000 lbs. This is one of those giant facts which stand head and shoulders higher than the crowd – so high and so broad that we can neither overlook it nor affect not to see it. It proves the existence of a thousand smaller facts that must stand under its shadow. It tells of sixteen times as many mills, sixteen times as many English families living by working those mills, sixteen times as much profit derived from sixteen times as much capital engaged in this manufacture. It carries after it sequences of increased quantity of freights and insurances, and necessities for sixteen times the amount of customers to consume, to our profit, the immense amount of produce we are turning out. There are not many such facts as these, arising in the quiet routine of industrial history. It is so large and so steady that we can steer our national policy by it; it is so important to us that we should be reduced to embarrassment if it were suddenly to disappear. It teaches us to persevere in a policy which has produced so wonderful a result; its beneficent operation makes it essential to us to deal carefully with it now we have got it. Some years ago an island arose in the Mediterranean and we were all discussing it and quarreling about it, and keeping up a brisk fire of diplomatic notes over it, when one fine morning the disgusted island suddenly went down again, and ships sent out to survey it sailed over the site it had occupied. We must not do anything to disgust this huge lump of profitable work which has suddenly arisen among us. we are inclined to look at it with a respectful and superstitious tenderness, rather as a gambler does upon a run of luck at cards, hoping it may last forever.

Lord BROUGHAM and the veterans of the old Anti-Slavery Society do not, we fear, share our delight at this great increase in the employment of our home population. Their minds are still seared by those horrible stories which were burnt in upon them in their youth, when England was not only a slave-owning, but even a slave-trading State. Their remorse is so great that the ghost of a black man is always before them. They are benevolent and excellent people; but if a black man happened to have broken his shin and a white man were in danger of drowning, we much fear that a real Anti-Slavery zealot would bind up the black man’s leg before he would draw the white man out of the water. It is not an inconsistency, therefore, that while we see only cause of congratulation in this wonderful increase of trade. Lord BROUGHAM sees in it the exaggeration of an evil he never ceases to deplore. We, and such as we, who are content to look upon society as Providence allows it to exist — to mend it when we can, but not to distress ourselves immoderately for evils which are not of our creation, — we see only the free and intelligent English families who thrive upon the wages which these cotton bales produce. Lord BROUGHAM sees only the black laborers who on the other side of the Atlantic, pick the cotton pods in slavery. Lord BROUGHAM deplores that in this tremendous importation of a thousand millions of pounds of cotton the lion’s share of the profit goes to the United States, and has been produced by slave labor. Instead of twenty-three millions, the United States now send us eight hundred and thirty millions, and this is all cultivated by slaves. It is very sad that this should be so, but we do not see our way to a remedy. There seems to be rather a chance of its becoming worse. If France, who is already moving onwards in a restless, purblind state, should open her eyes wide, should give herself fair play by accepting our coals, iron, and machinery, and, under the stimulus of a wholesome competition, should take to manufacturing upon a large scale, then these three millions will not be enough. France will be competing with us in the foreign cotton markets, stimulating still further the produce of Georgia and South Carolina. The jump which the consumption of cotton in England has just made is but a single leap, which may be repeated indefinitely. There are a thousand millions of mankind upon the globe, all of whom can be most comfortably clad in cotton. Every year new tribes and new nations are added to the category of cotton-wearers. There is every reason to believe that the supply of this universal necessity will for many years yet to come fail to keep pace with the demand, and, in the interest of that large class of our countrymen to whom cotton is bread, we must continue to hope that the United States will be able to supply us in years to come with twice as much as we bought of them in years past.

“Let us raise up another market,” says the Anti-Slavery people. So say we all. We know very well that the possibility of growing cotton is not confined to the New World. The plains of Bengal grew cotton before COLUMBUS was born, and we, with our mechanical advantages, can actually afford to take the Bengal cotton from the growers and send it back to them in yarns and pieces cheaper than they can make it up. So, also, thousands of square miles in China are covered by the cotton plant; and some day we may perhaps repeat the same process there. Africa, too, promises us cotton. Dr. LIVINGSTONE found a country in which the growth was indigenous, and where the chiefs were very anxious to be taught how to cultivate it for an European market. There is no lack of lands and climate where cotton could be produced. It is said of gold that no substance in nature is more widely diffused and more omnipresent; but, unfortunately, it is diffused under conditions which make it seldom possible to win it with a profit. So it is of cotton. The conditions under which it becomes available for our markets are not often present in the wild cotton which our travelers discover; nor are they to be immediately supplied.

Remember the efforts which the French have made to produce cotton in Algeria, the enormous prizes they offered, the prices at which they bought up all the produce, the care with which fabrics were prepared from these cottons at Rouen and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, and then note the miserable result after so many years of artificial protection. It will come eventually; as the cotton wants of the world press heavily and more heavily it must come. We shall have cotton from India, from China, and from Africa; we would advocate every means within reasonable limits to quicken the development. We would not even ask whether to introduce cotton culture upon a large scale into Africa would be to secure that African cotton would not be raised by slave labor. But even Lord BROUGHAM would not ask us to believe that there is any proximate hope that the free cotton raised in America will, within any reasonable time, drive out of culture the slave-grown cotton of America. If this be so, of what use can it be to make irritating speeches in the House of Lords against a state of things by which we are content to profit? Lord BROUGHAM and Lord GREY are not men of such illogical minds as to be incapable of understanding that it is the demand of the English manufacturers which stimulates the produce of slave-grown American cotton. They are neither of them, we apprehend, so reckless or so wicked as to wish to close our factories and throw some two millions of our manufacturing population out of bread. Why, then, these inconsequent and these irritating denunciations? Let us create new fields of produce if we can; but, meanwhile, it is neither just nor dignified to buy this raw material from the Americans, and to revile them for producing it.