A US President's kind words to suffering Brits

Ukrainian soldiers helping civilian evacuees

What a kind gesture it is, by the President of the United States, to write to a group of blue-collar workers on the other side of the Atlantic, impoverished through no fault of their own by the effects of a war in which they, and their country, have no direct part, to congratulate them on their sacrifices and encourage them in their devotion to the cause of freedom.

“I know,” wrote the President, “and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis.”

The sufferings were indeed intense, and widespread. Lack of raw materials had caused factories to close or move onto short-time working. Around 440,000 workers in Lancashire were out of work or on reduced pay. Add in all the support industries and the number rose to nearly a million. With dependants, nearly four million people were suffering terrible economic pressure because of the war.

A tight-fisted benefits system meant that assistance to the affected families was miserably inadequate. So the President was right: there was plenty to deplore in the sufferings of those working-class families.

“It has been often and studiously represented,” the President went on, “that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”

“Ah,” you’ll be saying, “we’re not talking about President Biden or the war in Ukraine. This is Beeson dipping into history again.”

Well, yes. Guilty as charged. The letter was written by Abraham Lincoln. The war wasn’t in Ukraine but within the United States itself. And, though it hadn’t started that way, it would end up being about whether slavery was an acceptable way of treating people in that country.

To Manchester, and the cotton industry workers of Lancashire generally, it wasn’t. And, following a mass meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, they’d adopted a resolution urging the US President to stick to his guns and defeat the rebellion in the Confederate States. That’s despite the pain of 4 million people, one in five of the total British population which, at the time, was just 20 million.

The cause of that pain was a glorious case of people who ought to know better taking an appallingly ignorant decision. The president of the so-called Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, had spent nearly ten years in the US Congress, eight of them in the Senate, and had served as Secretary of War for four. His Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, had spent sixteen years in the House of Representatives.

Despite all that experience, however, they turned out hopelessly unprepared for the subtleties of international diplomacy at the head of what they hoped to make an independent nation.

Convinced, like many from the Southern states, of the slogan ‘Cotton is King’, they believed that cutting off supplies would cause enough economic mayhem to force the European nations, and in particular the then superpower Britain, into the war on their side. That’s what Lincoln meant by “forcing their sanction to that attempt”.

So at a time when the Union still couldn’t impose an effective blockade on the Southern ports, the Confederate leadership kindly put an embargo on themselves. The blackmail worked amongst some in Britain, who urged the government to break the embryonic Union blockade and secure cotton supplies from the South. That would, indeed, have dragged the British into the war on the Confederate side. 

But far more people were having none of it. Britain had banned the slave trade over half a century earlier. It had abolished slavery in its possessions thirty years before. There was a deep-seated hatred of the institution.

So the Lancashire cotton workers, despite their desperate condition, called on the US President to keep up the war against the Confederacy and slavery.

Lancashire cotton workers looking for relief from their plight

“I do not doubt,” Lincoln’s reply to the Manchester appeal concluded, “that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.”

Well, the parallels with today’s world aren’t exact, but they’re there.

Putin has shown himself as ignorant as Jefferson Davis. If he wanted to reduce Ukraine to dependency on Russia, he could have done it far less expensively and without losing a single Russian (or Ukrainian) life, by turning Ukraine into a client for his gas and his manufactures. In fact, that would not only have cost far less, but would also have earned much needed income for his own country. 

Unlike the US Civil War, this war hasn’t led to unemployment in Britain. The poverty it’s causing has come through a cost-of living crisis. But, just like in the 1860s, the benefits system, embryonic then, savagely cut by the government today, is wholly inadequate to alleviate it. Despite all that, there’s no sign, yet at least, of the victims withdrawing their backing for Ukraine. Just as back then the Lancashire cotton workers didn’t withdraw their backing from Lincoln’s United States, throughout a war that lasted four years.

And there’s a parallel to another historical event. Or perhaps a counter-parallel, if there is such a thing. The suffering today is caused by the West standing with Ukraine and arming it against illegal, brutal aggression. Back in the 1930s, the Western Democracies stood back and let the Spanish Republic go to the wall. They stuck to a policy of non-intervention blatantly flouted by Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, spelling doom for Spanish democracy for the next four decades.

Well, it’s good to see that’s not happening this time around. Just as it’s good to see that so far people are taking the pain without losing heart. They’re living up to the example of their predecessors among the Lancashire mill workers.

An example rightly appreciated by the US President back then.