In the 19th century, Manchester was the global centre of cotton manufacturing. Within 50 miles of the city centre – across Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire – there were almost 2,500 mills employing more than 400,000 people. Visitors to the world’s first industrial city were awestruck: when the French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville came to the city in 1835, he wrote of “a thousand noises” rising from Manchester’s “damp, dark labyrinth”, of “the crunching wheels of machines, the shriek of steam from the boilers, [and] the regular beat of looms”.
The city known as “Cottonopolis” clothed the world, but it was dependent on “King Cotton”: in a 1,000-mile belt from the east coast to eastern Texas, millions of enslaved African Americans were forced each day to the hellish work of planting, growing and picking that crop. Propelled by Eli Whitney’s gins (that is, “engines”), which allowed for the rapid separation of the fibre from the seed, the American south had cornered the Atlantic market. By 1860, it was supplying about 80% of the raw cotton that Britain imported.
This was why the outbreak of the American civil war in 1861 was calamitous for Manchester and its mills. At first, the Confederate states attempted “cotton diplomacy”, whereby southern merchants refused to export cotton in the hope that it would encourage foreign governments to recognise the new slave-holding republic.
Although stockpiles would sustain Manchester through this initial embargo, there was not enough in the warehouses to survive the subsequent Union blockade. As Lincoln’s navy strangled a southern economy that depended on trade, preventing cargo ships from leaving ports such as Charleston and Savannah, the global supply of cotton fell, and its price rose in turn.
Manchester suffered dreadfully. Without raw materials, the mills could not function. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. Those who waited for work to return queued outside soup kitchens or fell upon municipal charity; many others, thinking that cotton was their only possible livelihood, emigrated to the American south. In the North Cheshire Herald, a poet wrote: “The smokeless chimney and the silent loom / Reflect each day accumulated gloom.”
Of course, some Confederate ships ran the gauntlet of the blockade, and some American cotton made it to Liverpool. Yet when this material, grown by enslaved people, got to Manchester, many labourers refused to come back to work. Despite their poverty and hunger, despite their pain during this “cotton famine”, they would not put the produce of slavery through their looms. After a meeting at the Free Trade Hall on New Year’s Eve 1862, in solidarity with the enslaved people of the American south, they went on strike.
The actions of these workers play a central role in the civic history of Manchester, and rightly so. But hostility to the Confederacy and support for enslaved Americans were not universal sentiments in Victorian Manchester, for cotton grown by enslaved people was essential to the city’s prosperity. It followed that, despite professing broadly abolitionist sentiments, the Manchester Guardian could write in May 1861 of “the emancipation of the south from dependence on the north” and that “to the south, the bonds of the union have been as burdensome as the fetters [of slavery] to the negro”. It was an ambiguous, ambivalent position – and one that well reflected Manchester’s historical relationship with slavery.
Part 2: Liberalism and slavery
In the late 1810s, in the years after Waterloo, Britain had plunged into depression and unrest. Luddites roamed the Midlands destroying machinery; conspirators plotted the murder of politicians and royalty alike. The response of Lord Liverpool’s Tory government – a loose coalition of conservatives – was to pass legislation that cracked down on free speech, radicalism, and dissent. The nadir came in 1819, at what would become known as Peterloo. As 60,000 people gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester to listen to speeches in favour of parliamentary reform, the cavalrymen of the Manchester and Salford yeomanry charged. They killed 18 people and injured 600 others.
This was the catalyst for the cotton magnate John Edward Taylor and the Little Circle of Manchester businessmen to establish the Guardian, a newspaper they would use to “zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious liberty [and] warmly advocate the cause of reform”. Though the Guardian would prove far from radical – with Taylor chiding the speakers at St Peter’s Field for appealing “to the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow countrymen” – its foundation was symptomatic of a nascent political liberalism.
Of course, “liberalism” had a particular meaning in the 1820s. It favoured the reform of parliament rather than “old corruption”; it supported religious toleration, not the Anglican supremacy; it found friends in finance and industry, not on the land.
In the earliest years of the Guardian’s history, the Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell founded the Catholic Association to pursue full civil rights for the “papists” who had long been excluded from public life; British soldiers began flocking to the standards of the Latin American revolutionaries; and the cause of Greek independence beguiled Byron and his fellow Romantics. And in January 1823, the veterans of the campaign against the transatlantic slave trade reconvened in the King’s Head tavern in London to establish the Anti-Slavery Society.
This would be their second great crusade. The first – despite bursts of antislavery sentiment in the 1770s and early 1780s – began only in 1787, when Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and nine Quakers launched a formal campaign to eradicate the national trade in enslaved Africans. Under the political leadership of William Wilberforce, they recruited compatriots into local “chapters” of their society and corralled their signatures on to massive parliamentary petitions – the first of which would come from Manchester.
Clarkson was a key figure when it came to organising activity outside London. He arrived in north-west England in late 1787 to find that Manchester was already in arms. Drawing support from the Society of Quakers, the Unitarian chapel on Cross Street, and the Literary & Philosophical Society, local abolitionists had been supplying antislavery material to Mancunian newspapers such as the Chronicle and the Mercury. “The news,” he reflected, “as it astonished [me] … almost overpowered me with joy.”
Clarkson further galvanised Manchester’s activists by giving a sermon at the Collegiate church, which is now the city’s cathedral. Within the crowd were “40 or 50 … black people standing round the pulpit”. By December, Manchester’s abolitionists had raised £300 for the campaign – more than £32,000 today – and Clarkson was soon using their petition as an example for others to follow.
Abolition of the slave trade did not mean the abolition of slavery. When the last British slave ship dropped anchor, more than 700,000 men, women and children were still in bondage.
Tracing the role of Manchester through the remainder of the abolitionist campaign is a difficult business. Wilberforce and his allies built momentum in the early 1790s, but the escalation of the French Revolution and the outbreak of war stopped them in their tracks, and abolitionism fell into abeyance for about 15 years.
It took a series of circumstantial events to revive it. The first involved the collapse of the French empire in the New World: the combination of Haitian independence, the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar, and Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States meant the French were no longer colonial rivals to the British. This meant that, even if abolition might jeopardise the relative prosperity of colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados, Britain would nonetheless remain the leading power in the Caribbean. The second factor, after 23 years of unbroken conservative rule, was the entrance of the liberal Ministry of All the Talents. So, when the abolitionists spied an opportunity and tried again, they succeeded: the Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the British trade in enslaved people from a final deadline of 1 March 1808.
Abolition of the slave trade, however, did not mean the abolition of slavery. When the last British slave ship dropped anchor, more than 700,000 men, women, and children were still in bondage, mostly in the West Indies.
Nor would abolition prevent Britain from seizing further slave colonies such as Demerara and Mauritius during the Napoleonic wars. Indeed, the abolitionists had denied even thinking about emancipation, with Wilberforce declaring that “before [the enslaved people] could be fit to receive freedom, it would be madness to attempt to give it to them”. This was partly because the West India Interest, the enslavers’ lobby, was too strong to yield on slavery itself, and partly because the abolitionists hoped that, if planters were forbidden from importing “fresh blood”, slavery simply would wither away. But these hopes were misplaced: slavery endured, and it was not until 1823 that the campaign resumed.
Part 3: ‘A state of degrading subjection’
In spring 1823, Thomas Fowell Buxton launched the parliamentary campaign for the emancipation of enslaved people in the British colonies. In the beginning, the abolitionists had few friends in the press. Siding with the enslavers were the Quarterly Review (arguably the most influential periodical in the English-speaking world at the time), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Bull, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and most newspapers. On the side of antislavery, vastly outnumbered, were the Edinburgh Review and the radical Westminster Review, but also the new Guardian, which in 1823 commented favourably on measures for “ameliorating” the condition of enslaved people, reprinted a letter from the leading abolitionist James Cropper, and reproduced a map illustrating the “impolicy” of slavery. Buxton’s campaign, the paper wrote, “should be strengthened by numerous and weighty petitions” and it urged “our fellow townsmen to lose no time in recording their detestation of slavery”.
Over the next 10 years, slavery would stand alongside parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation as one of the three great issues of the day. In these early years of the Guardian, the paper advertised and reviewed countless pamphlets on slavery and emancipation; it reported on petitions that local abolitionists were circulating before sending them to parliament; it promoted the boycott of sugar grown by enslaved people; it urged the government to establish diplomatic relations with the free Black republic of Haiti; and it kept readers abreast of events in the national antislavery campaign.
If the disparity between the Guardian’s positions on British colonial slavery on the one hand and American slavery on the other appears confusing at first, it is easily explained … Most of the cotton consumed by Manchester’s mills came from the United States.
That said, the paper was more equivocal in its coverage of slavery in the United States. Consider a dispatch that the Guardian published in 1823, from an unnamed “correspondent in the United States, whose means of information, and general capacity for judging” were in the words of the editors “first-class”. The correspondent referred to the aborted rebellion organised by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, one year earlier, saying “it arose among the pampered and indulged slaves” although “a very large majority” of enslaved people, the author stated, “feel themselves too well-off to wish for emancipation … Upon the average, they live better, and more comfortably, and more contentedly, than the great mass of white labourers in England.”
If the disparity between the Guardian’s positions on British colonial slavery on the one hand and American slavery on the other appears confusing at first, it is easily explained. Elsewhere in his letter of 1823, the American correspondent opined: “I do not apprehend much danger of a permanent fall of cotton among us, because it will, ere long, become the great article of cloathing [sic] all over the world.” It was an obvious reference to the commercial artery which ran directly from South Carolina to Lancashire. Most of the cotton consumed by Manchester’s mills came from the United States, meaning that rebellions by the enslaved people of America were potential disasters within that supply chain. The West Indies, however, had almost completely divested itself of cotton in the late 18th century, focusing instead upon sugar; accordingly, there would be relatively little cost to Manchester if British abolitionism succeeded.
This may explain why the Guardian gave one of the more sympathetic British accounts of the Demerara rebellion of 1823. In that new British colony on the South American coastline, several thousand enslaved people had risen up to claim the rights that, they believed, the colonists were withholding. While many parts of the British press railed against the abolitionists and missionaries who had allegedly provoked the uprising, the Guardian referred to an “unfortunate affair” in a place “where human beings are held in a state of degrading subjection”.
Unlike Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, which had been linchpins of the Atlantic slavery economy for decades, Manchester simply did not have many long-term connections to the West Indies, and this pattern repeated in other industrial towns such as Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle. Indeed, despite the size and importance of Manchester to the 19th-century British economy, only 10 of its residents appear in the register of British enslavers that the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project at University College London has compiled.
Among these Mancunian enslavers was Eleanora Atherton. Described as “a calm, religious woman, gentle, sedate, and subdued in manner”, Atherton is remembered for being carried through Manchester’s streets in a sedan chair, and for her generosity: in the last three decades of her life, she gave more than £100,000 – at least £8.3m today – to worthy causes in and around Manchester, especially to schools and churches. It is remembered less well that much of Atherton’s wealth came from two plantations in Jamaica on which more than 700 people were enslaved. Among Manchester’s other residents with a direct interest in slavery was John Diggles Bayley, whose family had once owned Booth Hall in Blackley.
Much more important to the conflict over emancipation were two Mancunians at the heart of the West India Interest, the lobby group that sought to protect and defend the slave colonies from abolitionist agitation.
George Hibbert was born in 1757 at Stockfield Hall outside Oldham to a cotton manufacturer who operated from premises on King Street, Manchester. Serving as chair of the West India Dock Company and as colonial agent for Jamaica – in which role he sought to influence terms of trade, arrange military protection, and resist adverse legislation – Hibbert by 1823 was probably the second most senior member of the Interest after its chair. He was also invested in slavery: in Jamaica, the Hibberts owned several plantations that enslaved more than 3,600 people.
Hibbert’s nephew James Heywood Markland was also pivotal to pro-slavery politics. The youngest son of another Manchester merchant, he trained as a lawyer and became secretary and solicitor to the Interest. Then, from 1823, Markland chaired the Interest’s literary committee, which had an annual budget of £1.8m (in today’s money) for protecting “the West India colonies through the press”. Markland was therefore at the centre of a literary network which printed pro-slavery pamphlets and placed anti-abolitionist articles in leading journals and newspapers. Among the other Mancunians who enlisted in this campaign were Robert Hibbert Jr – Markland’s cousin – and the Romantic writer and opium eater Thomas De Quincey, who insisted that “not a groan ascends to heaven from any child of Africa under authority of British law”.
For the first seven years of the abolitionist campaign, the enslavers held sway.
It took the political decline of the Tories, beginning in the late 1820s, to advance the cause. And when, in 1830, the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, vowed never to entertain parliamentary reform, his government fell within days. This let in the Whigs, led by Earl Grey, who had been in political exile since 1807.
The Guardian was far from optimistic, complaining that between Grey and Wellington there was “no comparison [that] can be drawn in the least degree unfavourable to the duke”, but at least in theory there was now a ministry prepared to abolish slavery. It did not follow, however, that slavery was a Whig priority; instead, the government focused on the reform of parliament, a policy the Guardian described as conducive “to the intellectual and moral improvement of the human race”. This was disappointing to the Anti-Slavery Society but it recognised that reform was essential to emancipation.
Without the disfranchisement of the “rotten” boroughs, where handfuls of voters could return MPs, and without the creation of new constituencies in the abolitionist heartlands, there would never be an anti-slavery majority in the Commons. Though not without drama – there were riots, protests and spells without a government – reform would pass in the spring of 1832; the Guardian hailed it as “the moment of a nation’s success”.
217 The number of MP candidates making emancipation pledges at the behest of the abolitionists in 1832 for the reformed parliament. Only five of them lost.
The government’s focus on reform also gave the abolitionists time to organise; now, the impatient young men of the Agency Society, a splinter group, sent antislavery lecturers on extensive tours, imploring first-time voters to press for slave emancipation as “the most noble exercise of their newly acquired privileges”. And when parliament dissolved in late 1832 for the first election of a reformed parliament, the abolitionists procured emancipation pledges from 217 candidates; only five of them lost.
Now there were MPs for Ashton-under-Lyne, Bury, Salford and Rochdale, and two each for Oldham and Manchester; none were Tories. In these places, as across Britain, slavery had been a defining issue in the election of 1832-33. The voters of Manchester elected Mark Philips and Charles Poulett-Thomson but not Samuel Jones-Loyd, who had condemned the enslaved rebels of Demerara in 1823. “In the present temper of a large portion of the public on the subject of slavery,” reported the Guardian, “this was an offence not to be forgiven.” The contest at Oldham was even more remarkable. The radical journalist William Cobbett had spent the previous decade lacerating the Anti-Slavery Society for addressing its philanthropy to “fat and greasy negroes”, but now he stood – and won – as an abolitionist.
Attention turned to how and when emancipation would take place. Negotiations between the government, the Anti-Slavery Society and the Interest would prove torturous but they struck a deal: in return for £20m in compensation (several billion pounds in today’s money) and at least four years of guaranteed labour from formerly enslaved people, the West Indian planters consented to emancipation. The Guardian quite approved: “We are convinced,” ran one editorial in June 1833, “that no plan for the abolition of slavery could have been worthy to be proposed by the government, or adopted by the legislature, of Great Britain, which was not based on the great principles of justice to the planter as well as to the slave.” Then, as the slavery abolition bill passed the Commons, the Guardian reflected on “the removal of a monstrous evil, where duty and policy alike required energetic and decisive action”. And though it “rejoiced” that the compensation to enslavers was “rightly fixed on a liberal scale”, its position was clear: slavery had been “a national crime”.
Part 4: Principle or prosperity?
Slavery died slowly. Emancipation took effect on 1 August 1834 but it would be another four years before the “apprenticeship”, the promised system of compulsory labour on Caribbean plantations, came to an end. Even after that, the former victims of colonial slavery did not ascend to the same rights, liberties and privileges as white Britons; conversely, they became subject to the same violence and rapacity that blighted much of the rest of the British empire. As one historian has written, the bells of “freedom rang hollow”.
For many Britons, however, emancipation was a great deed, an incomparable achievement. Almost overnight, the men who had fought for decades in defence of slavery now whitewashed their histories and denied their complicity, seeking to share in the glory. American missionaries travelling in the Caribbean in the mid-1830s noted that the planters, who only years before had been threatening to secede from the empire, now celebrated emancipation as if it had been their idea all along.
At home, Robert Peel, whose father became a millionaire through cotton, had spoken out viciously against emancipation: he had argued that “moral improvement … alone” could prepare Africans for freedom, and that hastily freeing enslaved people, whom he compared to Frankenstein’s monster, would plunge the West Indies into “a succession of barbarous conflicts”. Yet by 1841 Peel would proclaim that the abolition of slavery was a “moral triumph” that shone more brightly in the pages of British history than any naval victory.
The foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill owners
The Manchester and Salford Advertiser, describing the Guardian in 1836
In Manchester, positions on slavery took an even more curious turn, for as much as Mancunians readily joined other philanthropic Britons in pursuing the abolition of the foreign slave trade and of slavery in Africa, there endured a blind spot when it came to the United States. The emancipation of enslaved people in the British West Indies had done nothing to lessen the dependence of Manchester’s mill owners on the cotton of the American south. And where the cotton interest went, the Guardian went too: in the view of the Manchester and Salford Advertiser, which claimed to speak for the workers, the Guardian was in 1836 “the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill owners”.
Who were these mill owners, these titans of the north? To give one example, the Philips family loomed large over Manchester and its politics for much of the Georgian and Victorian periods. John Philips and his brother Nathaniel were pioneering cotton merchants in the late 18th century and their house, the Dales, now gives its name to an area of Bury. Mark Philips, the grandson of Nathaniel, was one of Manchester’s first two MPs; his younger brother, Robert Needham Philips, became MP for Bury; and Sir George Philips, one of the Guardian’s original funders, was such a successful, domineering businessman that he shared in the nickname of the antebellum south, “King Cotton”.
There were the Gregs, too. After privateering during the seven years’ war and investing in West Indian sugar plantations, the family built up a fortune with which they founded Quarry Bank Mill at Styal outside Wilmslow, now a National Trust property. And there was the proprietor of the Guardian, John Edward Taylor himself, whose connections to slavery are discussed elsewhere in this publication. All such men, all such families, whose wealth contributed to the construction of so many Manchester landmarks, and whose warehouses now figure as bijou apartments in regenerated neighbourhoods, required the labour of enslaved African Americans to generate their profits.
And so, as the US drifted towards a war over the future of American slavery, the Guardian’s ambivalence towards the enslavement of African Americans endured. In November 1861, only days before the Confederate states elected Jefferson Davis as their president, an editorial column deplored the making of war in the cause of abolition. “Certain states moved by holy indignation at the mischief which slavery is producing in a neighbouring community,” it noted, “have made up their minds to exterminate it by force. We have never done or said anything to lead it to be supposed that we should approve of this proceeding. On the contrary, it is distinctly opposed to the notions of justice by which we profess to regulate our own conduct.”
In 1862 Manchester’s workers charged the Guardian ‘with having pro-slavery proclivities and desiring the maintenance of the institution of slavery’.
When the war came, British liberals and the new Liberal party were in a bind, for although many maintained a principled hostility to slavery, four great issues weighed in favour of the Confederacy. First, southern Americans were fighting for the right of self-determination, which Britain had supported in Greece and Belgium. Second, there was trade: unlike during the British controversy over slavery, when the abolitionists had been free-traders, in America it was “the north imposing bonds on trade”. Third, there was no great affinity for the American republic, with the Guardian balking at an arrogant Union which pretended to a “future grandeur” where it might dictate terms to the world. Finally, of course, there was cotton: was a principle worth the prosperity of Manchester, the livelihood of half a million people?
The Guardian, therefore, although it conceded that Lincoln was “sincere and well intentioned” and that the Union’s cause was just, declared in October 1862 that it was “an evil day, both for America and the world, when he was chosen president of the United States”. Within two months, Manchester’s workers charged the Guardian “with having pro-slavery proclivities and desiring the maintenance of the institution of slavery”. The report of the meeting notes that the resolution passed “with cheers”.
Part 5: Britain’s failure of recognition
The purpose of researching and writing the history of slavery is not to prompt bouts of self-loathing, hand-wringing, or teeth-gnashing. Nobody alive in Britain today is responsible for the views or actions of Britons who lived and died more than 150 years ago; yet they are responsible for us and the world we inhabit. Studying British history, therefore, is not just about understanding what happened but also about understanding where we came from, how we did so, and why.
In my view, Britain has been unique in the way that it celebrates abolition and emancipation without duly recognising the extent of the slave trading and slave-holding that came before. In 1713, at the treaty of Utrecht, the British seized the monopoly in selling enslaved people to Spanish colonies, the “asiento”, and gave it to the South Sea Company of “bubble” fame. From that date until 1 March 1808, British ships trafficked 2.65 million Africans across the Atlantic, more than any other nation during that period. (The total historical figure for Britain is 3.26 million, exceeded only by Portugal and Brazil.)
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, slavery seeped into every part of British life. Coastal cities such as Glasgow, Bristol and Liverpool grew rich on slave labour, both West Indian and American; absentee planters erected stately homes and bought seats in parliament; and the profits made from sugar, coffee, and cotton sloshed through the world’s most advanced economy, boosting railways, financial houses, and insurance firms. To say that slavery alone generated this wealth goes much too far but, at the same time, it is impossible to write the economic history of Britain without understanding the importance of slavery to its profits.
And when the abolition of the British slave trade occurred at last on 1 March 1808, Britain was not the first country to do this. Of the independent, sovereign states in existence at the time, Denmark, Haiti and the US had beaten Britain to the punch (indeed, every American state except South Carolina had already abolished the trade). The same applies to emancipation: by 1834, many northern states of the American Union, Haiti (again), and much of Latin America had provided for the extinction of slavery. Further still, while British abolitionists then propelled the country into the prosecution of the international slave trade, they did not always wear this as a badge of pride; in a deeply, intensely and sincerely religious era, this was a means of atonement for historical sins, not a cause for self-congratulation.
The complexities and ambiguities of Britain’s historical relationship to slavery are inherent in the history of Manchester, too. In the 19th century there were some Mancunians who fought for abolition, some who defended slavery, and some who would express sympathy for the slave-holding American south despite supporting emancipation in the British colonies. It is far from a straightforward story, and so it matters to know that some of the magnificent, fabled buildings in the city centre – the Royal Exchange, the Portico and John Rylands libraries, and the older buildings at the university, where I often write – were built using profits derived from slavery, both British and American. It matters that my friends live in Ancoats in renovated warehouses that once stored produce made by enslaved people. This does not mean that I hate those buildings, or that they are not beautiful; but it matters because it explains why they were built and why they are there. If it had not been for slavery, Manchester would not look the way that it does, or be the way that it is today.
• A special Cotton Capital magazine will be published on Saturday 1 April. To order copies from the Guardian bookshop visit guardianbookshop.com/cotton-capital
