From The Smithsonian:
During the first half of the 19th century, factories in Lancashire spun threads and churned out vast quantities of woven cloths using raw cotton imported from the United States. The output was such that the English county earned the moniker “workshop of the world.” But after the American Civil War broke out in 1861, and the Northern army blockaded Southern ports, cotton supplies were unable to reach England. Lancashire cotton mills were forced to close, and thousands of workers were left without a source of income.
After they were abruptly plunged into poverty, some workers turned to poetry to convey the devastation of the so-called “Lancashire Cotton Famine.” As Alison Flood reports for the Guardian, researchers at the University of Exeter have been scouring local archives to find these poems—many of which have not been read for 150 years. The 300 works that the team has discovered so far are now available to view in an online database, and more will continue to be added as the project progresses.
The poems were published in newspapers, which often had a daily poetry column. “People wanted to listen in on the working classes and follow the lives of real people,” Simon Rennie, a lecturer in Victorian poetry at Exeter University and one of the historians behind the project, tells David Collins of the Sunday Times. “The poems are written as if you are eavesdropping on a conversation.”
. . . .
Written between 1861 and 1865, the poems featured in the database range markedly in subject and tone. Some are forlorn, like “Christmas, 1861” by W.A. Abram. “Lo! saintly Christmas looketh in,” he wrote, “Seeth Famine sitting at our gates/ Amid despair and squalor/Famine, whose swift arm subjugates/The loftiest mortal valor.”
Others are comic, like an 1864 work poking fun at Abraham Lincoln. “When he was young – ’tis said that he/ Began his occupation/ By splitting rails, out in the west/ Of the great Yankee nation,” the author, who signed his name as “A Joker,” quipped. “And when a man – so snarlers tell/And law was his employment/Then chopping logic, splitting hairs/He made his great enjoyment.”
. . . .
The cotton famine poems are valuable to historians because they represent the perspectives of the 19th-century working class, “which, in spite of renewed academic interest in such material, remain underappreciated,” according to the project’s website. The poems also highlight little-known literary talents from the Victorian age. In his interview with Collins of the Sunday Times, Rennie singled out the work of William Cunliam, which he says is “up there with the very best examples of poetry from the era.” Cunliam, whose real name may have been Williffe Cunliffe, wrote in both Lancashire dialect and standard English. His poems often included both appeals for charity and visceral descriptions of poverty. In the 1863 poem “God Help the Poor!” he writes:
“God help the poor! – ye rich and high/With lands and mansions fine/Think of the poor in their cold, bare homes/Can you let them starve and pine?/Think of their shivering rag-clad limbs/And spare, from your plenteous board/A crust, for to fill their foodless mouths;/A mite from your golden hoard.”
Link to the rest at The Smithsonian
The Confederate ports were blockaded by the US Navy, not the Union Army. If you cannot get a simple thing like that right, why should I believe anything else you say?
A minor historical point: my understanding is that the cotton famine was caused not by the North’s blockade – which was initially not that effective other than it stopped the use of northern ports – but by the South’s cotton embargo. Later in the war when the blockade was effective there was large scale substitution by East Indian and Egyptian cotton which would have kept at least a minority of the mills open.
My English ancestors came from this area of the country – Preston, specifically. Around 1880 they emigrated to the US to work in the lace and textile mills of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Perhaps the economic disruption caused by the event described here played a role in their decision.