Short Time

Henry Ashton. Blackburn, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Monday, 2 September 1861.

It is worth stating plainly that the Union's survival was purchased in part by the deliberate impoverishment of English working people who had no say in the matter and derived no benefit from it.

The Universal Register: The American Civil War

The Minister sent me home by way of Lancashire.

He said that I was to go to Liverpool in any case, to take the packet, and that I might as well go by the mill towns and look at them on the way, since nobody in New Westminster had ever looked at them and everybody in New Westminster would soon be making decisions about them. He said that he wished me to write down what I saw, plainly, as I would write a report on a fort, and to send it to him from Liverpool before I sailed, and that he would send it on to Mr Seward with his own covering letter, and that Mr Seward would read the covering letter. He said this without any expression, and I understood that he meant it as a joke and also that it was true.

He said one more thing, when I took my leave of him in the study in the square, with the baronet’s ancestors looking down at us both. He said, “You will be asked in Lancashire what the war is for, Captain. I should think about the answer on the train.” I said that I would. I thought about it all the way to Manchester, and I had not found it when I got there, and I had not found it when I left.

I had a letter to the gentleman who owned the three mills near Blackburn, the one who had asked me at the dinner in Belgrave Square whether I thought it was just; he had told me, when we parted that evening, that if I ever wished to see what my blockade looked like from the other end I should come to him, and that he would show me. I wrote from London to say that I was coming, and he met me at the station at Blackburn himself, on the Monday morning, in a gig, in the rain, and shook my hand as though we were old friends, and said, “Well, Captain. You came. I did not think you would.”

Blackburn lies in a valley between hills, and the valley is filled from one side to the other with mills, and the mills are filled, or were, with looms. I have never seen anything like it before or since. The chimneys stand up out of the town like the masts of a fleet at anchor, a hundred of them, more, so close together that from the hill above the station they seem to grow out of each other, and in ordinary times, he told me, the smoke from them hung over the valley so thick that a man could not see the far side of it at noon. That morning I could see the far side. There was smoke from perhaps half of the chimneys, and from the rest there was nothing, and the rain came straight down through the clear air on to the slates.

“Short time,” he said, when he saw me looking. “Three days in the week, at most of them. Two at some. None at a few.” He pointed with his whip. “That one stopped on Saturday. Eight hundred hands. They had been on three days since July.”

He took me through his own mills, all three, that morning. They were on four days, because he had laid in more cotton in the spring than his neighbours had, and was spinning it out, he said, like a miser spinning out his candles. The weaving sheds were long and low and lit from the roof, with the looms in rows as far as I could see, and the noise of them when they were running was the loudest noise I have ever heard that was not a battle; and in the sheds that were standing idle, because it was not their day, the looms stood under their covers in the grey light and the floors had been swept and there was nobody there at all. He showed me his warehouses, and the bales in them, and told me to the week how long they would last. He said that he had sent his agent to Liverpool to buy at any price, and that there was very little at any price, and that what there was came from the loyal polities, from Mississippi and Tennessee and the like, and that the brokers were asking for it what they would have asked for silk. He said all of this as a man reads out a bill.

Then he took me into the town.

I am not going to describe all of it, Sir, because I do not think I could do it justice and I do not think it is my place. I am an American officer, and these were Your Majesty’s British subjects, and the hunger I saw was theirs and not mine. But I said that I would tell you what your silence was like in the places it was felt, and I have come to believe that the mill towns of Lancashire were among those places, and that hardly anybody on either side of the ocean has ever thought of them so, and so I will tell you what I saw, plainly, as the Minister asked.

I saw streets of small brick houses, very clean, built back to back, with the doors standing open because there was no reason to shut them, and the women on the steps with their arms folded, and the men standing about at the corners in the middle of the morning with nothing to do, which was a thing that had not been seen in Blackburn, my host said, in his lifetime. I saw the pawnshops, with their windows full of clocks and Sunday coats and wedding rings and the tools of trades, and a queue at the door of one of them that went round the corner. I saw a soup kitchen that had been opened that week in a chapel schoolroom by the Methodists, and the line of children outside it, each with a can. I saw a woman come out of a baker’s with a loaf and break it in half on the step and give half of it to the woman next door, without either of them saying anything. I saw no riot and no violence and no drunkenness. My host said that there would be none. He said, “They will starve quietly, Captain. They are very good at it. They have had practice.”

It was not yet as bad as it became. I want to be accurate about that. It was September, and the mills were on short time and not yet stopped, and the families had their savings and their furniture and their club money still, most of them; the worst of it came that winter and the next, after I had gone, and I know of it only from the papers and from letters. What I saw was the beginning. But I saw it begin, and I saw that the people it was happening to knew exactly why, and could have told you the name of every American harbour from which their cotton was not coming, which was more than most members of the Commons at New Westminster could have done.

In the afternoon my host took me to see a family he knew, the family of a weaver who had worked in his sheds for twenty years, and whose wife had worked beside him until the children came.

They lived in one of the brick streets behind the mill, in two rooms, with a third under the roof. The weaver himself was out, walking to Preston to see whether there was work there, which there would not be. His wife was at home with four children and her mother, and she knew who I was, because my host had sent word, and she had put on a clean apron and laid the table with a cloth, and there was tea in the pot that I am quite certain she could not afford and that I could not refuse. She was perhaps thirty, very thin, with red hands, and she spoke with the accent of that county, which I will not try to write, because I would make her sound comic and she was not.

She asked me first about the cotton: whether the blockade would last, and how long, and whether it was true that the Americans meant to stop every bale. I told her what I could, which was not much, and none of it good. She listened to it as Daniel had listened to me in the hall at Marlfield, with her head a little on one side, as though she were checking my figures. Then she asked me the question the Minister had said I would be asked.

She asked me what the war was for. She said that the minister at their chapel had told them that it was a war to free the black people in America, and that if that was so, she and her husband had talked it over and they thought they could bear it a while; that they had been poor before and would be poor again, and that it was a terrible thing to own a person, and that if their going short would help to stop it then they would go short, and not complain. But she said that a man at the corner had told her husband it was nothing of the kind; that it was a quarrel between the American gentlemen about their Parliament and their taxes, and that the black people would be slaves at the end of it whichever side won; and that if that was so, then she did not see why her children should go hungry for it. She asked me which was true. She said that I was an American officer, and a Virginian, my host had told her, and that I would know.

I have been asked a great many hard questions in my life, Sir, by generals and by lawyers and by John Brown. I have never been asked one I wished less to answer than that one, in that room, with her mother watching me from the chair by the empty grate and the children watching me from the stairs.

I told her the truth. I told her that the Union was fighting to put down a rebellion, and that the rebellion had been made by men who wished to keep their slaves, and that this was the root of the whole thing and everybody knew it. But I told her that the Union had not said that it was fighting to free them. I told her that the Prime Minister had said that he was fighting to defend the constitution, and that the constitution, as it stood, said nothing about slavery one way or the other, and left it to the polities, and that there were loyal polities still fighting on the Union’s side where it was lawful to own people, and that I did not know whether that would change. And I told her, because I could not look at her and not tell her, that I was a Virginian, as she had heard, and that I owned twenty-six people myself, in Virginia, on my family’s place, and that I was fighting for the Union all the same, and that I did not know how to make that sound like an answer to her question, because it was not one.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Then it’s not for them.”

I said that I did not know. I said that it might come to be.

She said, “But it’s not for them now.” And she poured me another cup of tea, and asked me whether I had children, and I said that I had not, and she said that I was lucky, the way things were, and we talked about other things until my host came for me.

I have tried to set that down exactly, and I am sure that I have not. I know that I did not give her the answer she wanted. I know that the answer she wanted would have been easy to give, and that a great many men in my position would have given it, and that it would have made her bear what was coming more easily, and that it would not have been true; and I know that I gave her the true one instead, and that it did her no good at all, and I do not know whether I did it out of honesty or out of a kind of pride in being honest, which is not the same thing and is a good deal less creditable. I have thought about her more than about anybody else I met in England, Your Majesty included, and I hope that you will forgive me for saying so. I do not know her name. My host knew it, and I did not ask him, and he is dead now.

I went on to Liverpool on the Wednesday, and found the town in an uproar.

I had come there to take the packet home, and to send the Minister my report, which I wrote that evening in my room at the Adelphi and which said, as plainly as I could make it, what I have told Your Majesty here, and a good deal more about the numbers of looms standing and the stocks in the warehouses that I will spare you. But it was the Exchange that was in an uproar, and I went down to it in the morning to see why.

Liverpool lives on cotton as Blackburn does, but from the other end; it is where the bales come in off the ships and are bought and sold before they go up the railway to the mills, and the men who buy and sell them meet every day on the flags behind the Town Hall, in the open air, in their hundreds, with their samples in their pockets, and do their business standing. That summer a good many of them had gone into a new business. The blockade, as I have said, was not yet closing very much, and the rebel ports were full of cotton that could not get out and short of everything else, and a man who could get a fast steamer in and out of Wilmington or Charles Town in the dark could make a fortune on a single voyage, both ways. Some of the firms on the flags had bought such steamers, or built them, or were building them on the river, low grey ships with raked funnels that burned hard coal so as not to smoke, and they had been sending them out by way of Nassau and Bermuda since the spring, and had done very well. Philip Lightfoot had come out of Wilmington in one. I learned that at Liverpool, from a broker who told me the ship’s name and her owner’s, and her profit on the voyage, as though it were a piece of local news, which I suppose it was.

The news that morning was that Your Majesty’s British government had agreed to the request.

It had been decided, the broker told me, in London, and the Admiralty had been given its orders; British squadrons were to go out to the American coast and work alongside our ships against the rebel ports and against the trade that supplied them, at the request of the ministry in New Westminster and on the ground that the two realms served the same Crown, and that the Crown’s British ships could not stand by while its American subjects were in rebellion against it. The papers had it by the afternoon. There was a great deal of argument about it in the papers, I remember, and some very hot letters, from men who said that it made Britain a party to an American quarrel that was none of her business, and from Americans in London, of the other side, who said that it was a betrayal of the King’s loyal subjects by the King’s British ministers; and the second argument, coming from men who had spent the summer telling England that the Royal Navy was the enemy, sat very oddly beside the petitions they were still sending to the King, and I think everybody noticed it. But the Exchange did not argue about it. The Exchange added it up.

I stood on the flags that morning among the brokers and watched them add it up. I watched a man who had two steamers on the river, nearly finished, sit down on the steps of the Town Hall and put his head in his hands. I watched the price of cotton go up while I stood there, by a farthing and then by another, because everybody on the flags could see that what was in the warehouses was going to be all there was. And I thought of the woman in Blackburn with her teapot, and of my charts in the long room under the skylight in Whitehall, being unrolled again, very carefully, by the Hydrographer and his two captains, so that Your Majesty’s ships would know where the channels ran and how deep, and where the forts could reach and where they could not; and I understood that I had helped to do this. I had helped, in my small way, to make the blockade that was emptying her cupboard. I had done it because it was my duty, and it was, and I would do it again; and it was going to be paid for in Blackburn, by people who had not been asked and would not be thanked and would get nothing whatever out of it, and she had asked me what it was for, and I had told her that it was not for them.

I sailed on the Saturday, in the packet for Halifax and Boston, with my empty box.

The river was full of shipping when we went down it, and among the shipping, moored off the yards on the Birkenhead side, there were three of the low grey steamers with the raked funnels, nearly finished, and nobody working on them. A man at the rail beside me, a Liverpool man going out to New York on business, pointed them out and said that they were a fortune going to waste, and that their owners would sell them for whatever they could get, and that he would not be surprised if they ended up running guns to somebody somewhere, since there was always somebody somewhere. I said that I supposed there was.

I stood at the stern and watched England go down behind us in the rain, as I had watched Ireland come up in May, and I thought about what I would say, if I were ever asked, about the summer I had spent in it. I thought that I had spread my charts on a table and told some sailors where the water was. I thought that I had walked twenty-two paces down a room and been spoken to about the floor. I thought that I had sat in my lodging with my oldest friend and looked at a paper with its seals unbroken and a note that nobody had signed. And I thought that I had sat in a weaver’s kitchen in Blackburn and drunk tea that she could not afford, and told her that the war that was starving her children was not for the people she was willing to starve for, and that I owned twenty-six of them myself. It seemed to me that this was the whole of it. It seemed to me that the war had already shown me everything it was going to show me, and that the rest would only be the same thing over again, louder.

I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about a great many things that year. But I was right about one thing, and I have never stopped being right about it. She paid. She and her children and the eight hundred hands at the mill that stopped on the Saturday, and all the others, in all the towns in that valley and the valleys beside it, through that winter and the next. They paid for the Union, as surely as any regiment of ours, and they had no say in it and got no good from it, and nobody in New Westminster has ever thanked them, and I do not think anybody in New Westminster knows that they should.

I am an American officer, Sir, and it is not my place to tell Your Majesty what you owe your British subjects. But I was there. And I promised to tell you what it was like.