Our Man in Charleston

[L Verge]

Busy, six-day week at work, so I have only gotten about thirty pages read of Our Man in Charleston. However, I found an online interview with the author, Christopher Dickey, that is quite interesting. Here's one snippet:

"BIOG: Just before the Civil War, the British are vehemently anti-slavery but are benefitting quite a bit from it in the form of cheap cotton. Was that a contradiction that they recognized?

CD: It was a contradiction that they rationalized. They emancipated all the slaves in the British Empire in 1833 and in 1807 had banned the slave trade with Africa. But they needed to get the best cotton they could at the lowest prices, and that cotton was being raised in the southern United States by slaves. They decided it was in their national interest to concede that slavery was an internal matter in the United States and bought that cotton even though they opposed the institution that was vital to its cultivation.

If you think about it, what does the United States have in common with the great oil producing states in the Middle East today? Almost nothing, but we buy a lot of oil. We let things slide with Saudi Arabia and we’re finding ways to work with Iran now -- all because they are producing the commodity that is most important to the modern world. Well, cotton was the most important commodity in the middle of the 19th century, so the British made their peace with it."

Good example of how history repeats itself! The full interview can be found at http://www.biographile.com (key word Robert Bunch). I should mention that Mr. Dickey has conversed with one of our forum members here, Don Doyle, whose Cause of All Nations deals with the foreign affairs issue during our Civil War. Mr. Dickey comments that it is very good to see new books coming out on the American relations with Europe at that time. He states that we need to understand that our Civil War was so much more than just military strategy and battle results.

I also did not realize that the slave trade continued to be so prolific into Brazil and Cuba well into the 1840s. The triangular trade route began in New York at that time. The last slave ship known to land in Brazil was in 1850, when a young captain known as Nathaniel "Lucky Nat" Gordon was chased by a British man-of-war and forced to unload his cargo on the Brazilian coast and destroy his ship. Mr. Gordon (a native of Portland, Maine) was said to have escaped dressed as a woman.