The Cotton Famine of 1862

L I B R.AnY OF THE U N I VER_5ITY or ILLINOIS 309.4-2 C829 ISSl y^ J>/ .Ty^ro^o/r\ C^i -^C^^^ Pk< jtL fL. jf^^-' THE COTTON FAMINE OF 1862-'63, WITH SOME SKETCH OF THE PROCEEDINGS THAT TOOK PLACE IN CONNECTION WITH THE LISBURN RELIEF COMMITTEE, ^ iielM C?tritiunr, TO WHICH IS ADDED A BRIEF NOTICE OF THE LATE MR. A. T. STEWART. WILLIAM MULLAN & SON, BELFAST AND LONDON. l88|, printed at the Belfast News-Letter Office.] 55, 57 S 59. DONEQALU St. I TO THOSE NOBLE AND GENEROUS-HEARTED PHILANTHROPISTS, AT HOME AND ABROAD, WHO CONTRIBUTED SO LIBER- ALLY TOWARDS THE RELIEF OF OUR LOCAL COTTON OPERATIVES DURING THE SAD TIMES OF 1863, THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS RE- SPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. Lisburii, yanuary, 1881, r 4 J, i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/cottonfamineof1800mcca I^^^VsA^^ ^^m^^^^^^Si Sls^JW.W''^^^^S^^^^^^S^^^^m ^mSIS^^^^^^K^^^ THE Cotton Famine OF i862-'63. CHAPTER FIRST. HE history of the international campaign, as carried on between the citizens of the Northern and Southern States of America during the four years that succeeded the Spring of 1861, includes, even in its least harrowing details, some of the saddest of modern chronicles. In all ages of the world, one effect of war has been to paralyse industry, and at the same time to sweep away much of its previous savings through the current expenditure. It may be questioned, however, whether at any previous period the blighting influence of that terrible scourge produced disasters so appalling as those that followed the warfare beyond the Atlantic. But the ill effects of that campaign did not end there. For a long series of years the spindles that whirled in the cotton mills of England and Scotland had drawn the great proportion of their raw material from the American plantations. Many millions of acres on the vast continent that flourishes under the Stripes and Stars were engaged in the growth of cotton during the of four-fifths season i860 ; perhaps of the produce were landed in London and Liverpool, and nearly all that importation was worked up in British mills. But soon after the demon of war had been let loose on the fair fields of the American planters, desolation spread on every side, and before the close of the second year three-fourths of all the cotton lands had been either destroyed or left untilled. Corn fields were trampled down, the greater part of the wheat crop was destroyed, and wherever the track of con- tending armies was to be seen, the whole face of the country was left wild-looking and desolate as it might have appeared a century before. Then it was that the effects of the war between the Northern and Southern sections of America began to tell on the social and commercial relations of the people on both sides the Atlantic. If we take the flaxen manufactures as an illustration, we find that the citizens of the United States imported from these realms 59,488,390 yards of linen in i860, and only 21,169,000 yards the following year. The gross value of all the exports thence from Great Britain and Ireland in i860 was ^£"2 1,67 7,000, against ;^ 9,064,500 in 186 1. This, however, formed only one portion of the losses then sustained. As already stated, the destruction of real property at the scenes of strife could hardly be estimated by the ordinary process of arithmetic : it far exceeded anything that followed the most fiercely-contested battles of Europe. The mere money cost was enormous, and the destruction of life was still more lamentable. Many were the stern lessons which that fratri- cidal campaign taught the statesmen and patriots of the New World, and hardly less instructive was the sermon which it preached to the senators of the Old Country. It was calculated that during the American war one hundred thousand men were killed, and four times the same number disabled. Many of the latter died after months of suffering and sickness—thus dying, as it were, many times. Then we have the domestic misery endured in so many households through the loss of their dearest relatives, and the worse than death on the battle-field which the tens of thousands endured in their maimed lives after what is called '"the glory of war" had long ceased to have any influence on the popular mind. The actual loss sustained by the destruction of property was five hundred millions of dollars, and the injury done to business, by land and sea, was not less than one hundred millions dollars. Maffit, one of the Southern destructionists, boasted that in his own 7 case he had sunk ships and burned cargoes to the amount of eleven milHons dollars. The New York Herald estimated that in the Autumn of 1863, several months before the proclamation of peace, the war-debt of the North and South amounted to five thousand millions of dollars. One of the most valuable lessons taught the people of the United Kingdom by the American campaign was that which proved how largely the commercial prospects of the Old World, of Great Britain and Ireland, depended on the peace and progress of the New Land on the other side the Atlantic. Much attention and considerable anxiety prevailed in 1859 and '60 relative to the future supplies of raw cotton, the spindles of all mills in the United Kingdom being then dependent for the great proportion of their raw material on the products of the American plantations. One section of Britain's economists had been indulging in very wild delusions relative to the importance of the trade with our Transatlantic cousins. "We have only to look out for other markets as outlets for our produce and manufactures, and these, when found, may far exceed those of the United States," was often heard as the great semi-seerdom of those sages. It was said that Uncle Sam was getting too big for his boots, and that some exertion should, therefore, be made to curtail his physical dimen- sions; but the effects of the war in 1861 and '62, with the stagna- tion of commerce throughout the United Kingdom, proved how much our general trade was dependent on that of our republican relatives, and how little the political economists, to whom we have alluded, knew about the great question of American commerce with Great Britain and Ireland. About the same time there arose a very portentous section of theorists, each of whom looked upon himself as having been gifted by Providence with prophetic wisdom respecting the discovery of extended fields of cotton growth. One of those sages stated that there would not be any dif^culty in obtaining from other lands such quantities of raw material as would make Lancashire and Lanark quite independent of the American States as to getting food for their spindles. " The planters of the East 8 Indian cotton-fields," it was stated, "could deliver low qualities of cotton at from three half-pence to two pence half-penny per pound, and if the Americans were to close their ports against British buyers, abundant supplies of raw material could be had elsewhere." Such was the absurd braggadocia and silly flourish which were frequently heard for some time before the American war flung all wild theories to the winds. It was well known to every person who had considered the subject that the East Indian grower of cotton had almost illimitable resources within his reach. He could procure labour in abundance at the wages of one rupee—about two shillings —a-week for the best hands. Millions of acres of the finest soil for cotton culture lay partially idle, the plant was a natural product, and could be seen growing wild in many rarely-trodden districts ; and yet it seemed to be quite forgotten, that, with all those advantages, the Asiatics had been far distanced in their race of competition with the planters of the New World beyond the Atlantic. Cotton, which the ancient writers described as the " wool of a plant," was grown in what are at present known as the Presidencies of Bengal and Bombay thousands of years before the Christian Era, but it was not until the Spring of 1786 that the energetic men of Georgia, in the juvenile Republic of America, commenced the enterprise of cotton- growing, and since then they have come to the front as the most extensive and most superior producers of that fibre in the universe. The silky product called Sea-Island, raised in the low ranges of coast that run between Charleston and Savannah, are unequalled for their beauty of texture. Some parcels of this class of cotton were sold in the Liverpool market at five shiUings a-pound in August, 1863. Alabama and Georgia planters are able to raise three hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, while the growers in Surat and other Indian settlements cannot produce more than one-third that average. These facts had long been known to thoughtful men in this kingdom; but there was still floating about a race of self constituted philosophers, who, while indulging in projects about getting supplies of cotton outside the plantations of the Far West, propounded idealisms wild and fantastic as the dreamiest follies of that respectable class ; of unbelievers who, some years ago, plagued the Churches with their absurdities on the Bible-wine question.

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