Some of the men and women who were impoverished by the cotton famine understood that the last hands to have touched the bales of cotton that arrived in the mills were those of the black slaves who had loaded them onto ships on the docks of Mobile and New Orleans. The Lancashire towns from which unions and cooperative societies emerged were those that most firmly supported the North and its advocacy of free labour. The town most strongly pro-North and most passionately anti-slavery was Rochdale, where abolitionist and anti-slavery societies had been vocally active long before the outbreak of
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