re: 154 years ago today.

quote:

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“It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery…and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.”

Woodrow Wilson, “A History of The American People”, page 231

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"Just off Albert Square in Manchester stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln, the inscription expressing gratitude to the Lancashire cotton workers for their support of the Northern Union forces against the Southern Confederate slaveholders in the American Civil War of 1861-65. The background was told in Radio 4’s Manchester and Liverpool: Britain's American Civil War, presented by TV historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt...

It was in Manchester however that an inspiring act of solidarity with the North occurred. Despite the Northern naval blockade of the Confederacy ending the supply of cotton and leaving thousands of Lancashire textile workers on the brink of starvation, they assembled on 31st December 1862 at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and sent a letter to Lincoln expressing their “hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity - chattel slavery - during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.”

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