Quincy, Sunday, August 25, 1861
In my letter I begged you to go to work and try to make the two countries understand each other, for to my eye our foreign relations look very formidable. Why, when England and France are collecting fleets in our southern waters, do we all of a sudden hear rumors of a joint Mexican protectorate? It would be a blessing to mankind, but how will it complicate our relations? This cotton question is beginning to pinch and soon, if ever, if you have any desire to be useful to your country, backed by any energy, you can be useful where you are.
In my letter I asked you to touch England through her pocket. For some time past I have been turning over in my mind an elaborate article on this cotton supply question, but necessarily to be of any good to any one it must be directed more to English eyes than to ours. I touched on it in my last letter, and now I should like to hand it over to you, to see if you can do anything with it. I would write it for the Edinburgh or some really influential review or magazine, but to have effect it should appear in November, when the cotton-shoe will begin to pinch dreadfully, and I would force it into print by laying the plan of it before Mr. Motley or the Governor, or any other person likely to have influence on editors. That done throw your soul into your work and write as if you meant what you said. You always affect in writing too much calmness and quaint philosophy. That will come to you in time, but you do it now at the price of that fresh enthusiasm which is the charm of young writers. If you write now, write as if you were pleading a cause and too much interested to be affected. Throw your soul into your work and say what you feel. If you don’t check it, your mannerism will ruin your style in less than five years.
However now for the subject. The books you ought to review, or rather hang your subject on, are Mann’s Manual of Cotton, a book of about one hundred pages; the third annual report of the Manchester Cotton Supply Association and the numbers for May and June of the Cotton Supply Reporter of Manchester, and any new book dealing of the troubles in this country. If you accept the subject I have many curious facts collected, which I will send you at once. Start at once with the paradox that, instead of desiring to break this blockade, England should pray it might last for two years and if necessary assist in enforcing it, as if enforced its inevitable result must be, after one or at most two years of high prices, to forever break down the price of cotton to a reasonable profit over the cost of its cheapest possible production. This opens the whole question of supply. Two things are necessary to the production of cotton – an abundance of labor and a cotton soil. Look into the question of soil first. A semi-tropical heat, with a distribution of rain, are the only essentials. India has not the last and will not do; but Central and South America, all Africa (which is not desert), Australia and the Fiji Islands are better than our cotton states and need only organized labor. This with all the necessary material of ships, channels of trade, custom and experience, our planters have to such a degree that while they would furnish a fair supply of cotton on moderate terms, they could kill competition. Now is England’s chance to free herself from what has been her terror for years. In India, in Egypt in Abyssinia and in South Africa, there is an unlimited amount of cotton land of the finest quality and labor is abundant, costing almost nothing, but unorganized. Two years’ competition will organize it and once organized it can sell the South. In Australia, the South Sea islands and Central America, there is no labor and here the cooley question rises. Properly regulated the trade would be a blessing, for the Chinese amalgamates and California is in point as well as Dana’s reflections on Cuba. The books I have mentioned will give you all the information necessary on these points. This would bring cotton down to the cost, with a profit, of its production in cheap labor countries, say three pence a pound. But it would also lead to immense indirect advantages. As a missionary scheme Africa would be opened up and Livingstone’s discoveries made of use; slavery in America would be killed and the slave-trade closed for ever, as the African would be more useful at home than abroad. You will find in the first few pages of a new book called Social Statics more curious facts and reflections on England’s efforts at the suppression of the slavetrade, and this leads to the amount yearly expended in its suppression in this way, and which the consequent withdrawal of the fleet would save that government, and the amount England could thus afford to pay to promote the enterprise. Finally it would open the untold tropical fertility of Africa to the commerce of the world and these advantages cannot be estimated. Thus cotton would be produced on both sides of the equator all the year round in unlimited quantities, and England would have by two years’ suffering cut the meshes which she could never have broken.
On the other hand England breaks the blockade, or the South is victorious, England may then as well hug her chains, for she must wear them. The Southern confederacy will be aggressive and more slaves and more cotton will be the cry. In spite of England the slave-trade will flourish and their system will spread over Mexico and Central America. Then with the advantages of their organization, slave labor will win the day and England may look for competition in vain. The cotton monopoly will stifle her in the end. They will pretend in Parliament that the recognition of the Confederate States will not extend the area of slavery and all that humbug. Expose this, for it will be a victory of slavery. Recognition will mean war and the prostration at the feet of slavery of free society in America. England can do this if she chooses, but let her not deceive herself and let the results of her action be patent.
Finally the importance of this struggle cannot be overestimated. On the inviolability of the blockade and the consequent cotton pressure throughout the world hangs the destruction of American slavery, the eternal suppression of the slave-trade, the emancipation of England from a thraldom under which her great industrial interest has groaned for fifty years, and finally the civilization and awakening from Barbarism of the great continent of Africa. Even America, deprived of her monopoly, would reap advantage from the result, and this I tried to show in my article in the Atlantic of last April. Are not these results worth the agony of two years of half labor in Lancashire? Are they not worth fighting for? Can England hesitate as to which side her interest favors – as to what course she will adopt?
Here is a general sketch of my idea. I think it would be of service in England and if written as a man should write who is writing for his country at such a time as this, it would surely command attention. Any assistance I can give you I gladly will; but I earnestly beg you, even if this subject does not please you, to make yourself useful in your present position in some way of this kind. You can’t tell how much effect here a sympathetic word from England has now, and you can be of the greatest use if you only will. . . .