His case linking the English Crown and the American South was only part hyperbole. Great Britain had outlawed slavery more than a generation earlier. But few nations benefited more from slave labor than England, with its looms, mills and clothing factories running full bore to outfit and enrich the aristocracy that Meagher had chastised at Jones’s Wood. The textile industry was the dynamo of England’s Industrial Revolution—one in five Britons was connected to the trade—and almost 80 percent of the cotton for that industry came from the slaveholding South.
