Clothing the Blue and Gray

At dawn on Friday, May 10, 1861, sailing ships and steamers from across the world waited to dock in Liverpool’s harbor. The bustling English port had once been a center of the slave trade, its merchants made rich by dispatching their vessels to rendezvous with slave traders at forts that dotted the West African coastline. Now it prospered by importing cotton—picked by slaves on plantations in the American South—to be transformed into cloth in the factories of Lancashire. More than 85 percent of the US cotton crop made its way to Liverpool, where it was sold by the