The Guardian publishes a series, 'Cotton Capital'

[David Lockmiller]

(03-29-2023 06:43 AM)Amy L. Wrote:  In case you have time and interest to read --

'our failure to remember what really happened is more than mere forgetfulness'
"Slightly tucked away from Manchester’s main thoroughfares, in a quiet square that bears his name, there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln – as it happens, just outside the windows of the Guardian’s offices in the city where the newspaper was founded nearly 202 years ago." ...

And https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cotton-capital

The British government was officially neutral. Many merchants in Liverpool, prioritising wealth at home over freedom abroad, backed the Confederate south and organised warships to support the enslavers. But in Manchester, a coalition of liberals, cotton workers and abolitionists came together to back the north. After a famous public meeting at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862, Manchester’s workers resolved to endure the privations of the blockade and lend their weight to the fight against slavery. (The Guardian did not support them: its leader on that day warned that “English working men” should “know better than to allow the organised expression of their opinion as a class to be thrown into one scale or the other in a foreign civil war”.)

Months later, Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks to the “working-men of Manchester”, part of which is inscribed on his statue. “I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis,” he wrote. “Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”