On January 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to textile workers in Manchester, England, a city with deep ties to the slave trade, thanking them for their sacrifice and solidarity in supporting an embargo on cotton harvested by enslaved workers.
Anti-slavery solidarity united Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, and British workers
But Lincoln went further than praising the stance of the Manchester workers in his open letter, a remarkable historical document by any standard. Soon thereafter he ordered relief ships, packed with provisions, to be sent to Liverpool to aid them in their time of hardship.
Two men who were in no doubt of the world-historical importance of the anti-slavery struggle raging across the Atlantic were Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
In an 1860 letter to Engels, Marx states that “In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America, started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
Five years on, in his capacity as head of the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, Marx addressed a letter to Lincoln in response to his re-election as president.
“Sir, we congratulate the American people upon your reelection by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is ‘Death to Slavery.’”
How workers fought US slavery and earned Abraham Lincoln’s gratitude
“In 1862 Manchester was in the grip of a so-called cotton
‘famine’ as a result of the Northern blockade of the US’s southern ports which reduced the flow of cotton to Great Britain and the rest of the world. It caused an economic depression in Lancashire especially but also in the whole of Britain.
“Much of the British elite was advocating to break the blockade and restart the use of Confederate cotton.
“As a result, workers and their unions organised a meeting at Manchester Free Trade Hall explicitly to support the struggle against the Confederates despite the great hardship, on moral grounds. Six thousand attended the mass meeting.
“The organisers of that meeting sent a letter to Abraham Lincoln declaring support for the blockade, saying they were going through great hardship but that the fight against slavery was more important – important for all working people.
A letter to Lincoln from the mass meeting organisers was sent on December 31 1862. It expressed support for the independence of the US.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 