Slavery and Blackburn’s Cotton – Part One

This series of four blogs is based on research using the stock and ledger books of Blackburn cotton merchants Messrs Cardwell, Birley And Hornby. Held at The John Rylands Library, these form part of the Wadsworth Manuscripts, donated by the family of Manchester Guardian editor and historian AP Wadsworth to University of Manchester Special Collections. I have also utilised Wadsworth’s research notes in conjunction with various online and printed resources (listed at the end). Although Wadsworth largely used the ledgers to calculate the price of cotton used in eighteenth century Lancashire mills, my research shows the origins of the cotton and its connections to the trading in and exploitation of enslaved people.

While the ledgers begin in 1767, the company existed in a different form before that date, and partnerships change throughout the six volumes. However, Richard Cardwell (1706-1785), John Hornby (1763-1841) and Richard Birley (1743-1812) owned the company during the key period of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Acting initially as cotton merchants and putters-out to Blackburn handloom weavers, with investment from Joseph Feilden (1736-1792), they constructed a water powered spinning mill in the village of Scorton and a cotton treatment plant at Walton near Preston. Later the Hornby family built Brookhouse Mill in Blackburn while the Birleys had a factory in Chorlton.

Wadsworth’s notes contain a hand-drawn graph showing from where the cotton originated during this period, broken down by date and country. Initially from ‘Smyrna’ (now Turkey), and then the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Tortola (British Virgin Islands), Jamaica and Dominica. Cotton also came from Brazil and India but largely it originated from the West Indies until 1798, the final year of Wadsworth’s graph, when it began to be imported from plantations in the US state of Georgia. In 1774 a group of Blackburn cotton manufacturers (including Cardwell, Hornby, Birley and Feilden) took out a newspaper ad stating that they would now use only better-quality West Indian cotton, which provides us with a definitive date by which the town’s mill owners had changed supplies.

When I began this project, I presumed that the different elements of the cotton process – its picking, shipping, sale and resale – would make tracing the material’s journey extremely difficult, if not impossible. The ledgers certainly show that the Blackburn business traded with numerous other cotton merchants and brokers in Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and London and this diffusion does make following the route of the raw material more difficult. However, Cardwell, Hornby and Birley also dealt more directly with plantation owners who used enslaved workers and the shipping companies involved in the triangular trade and import/exporters. In the ledgers are also payments to captains of those vessels and even to businesses which supplied ships with sails. So, although the research available on websites such as Slave Voyages does not show that the partners invested in the slave trade, it seems quite possible that they were involved, and the fourth and final blog in this series explores this in more depth.

Within the first ledger (1767-1792) is business the Blackburn merchants conducted with Thomas Hinde (1720-1798). Originally based in Lancaster, and sometimes described as the city’s leading slaver, Hinde moved his growing operations to Liverpool, later joined by his sons Thomas junior (1757-1829) and Samuel (1778-1840). According to Slave Voyages, their ships made around 70 triangular journeys, picking up enslaved people in Africa, transporting them to sell on islands in the Caribbean and then returning with goods including sugar, rum and cotton to Liverpool. There are two references to the company in the ledger. One stock take confirms that the warehouse held 19 bags of cotton valued at £283 supplied by Thomas Hinde but does not say from where the material originated or when it arrived. However, the 1786 accounts state: “monies paid…for St Domingo cotton to Thomas Hind & Son which yet remains in their hands and which we put no profit upon” – for which the stock book confirms that the Blackburn company paid £2,629. St Domingo is a port of the Dominican Republic, and triangulating this with information on Slave Voyages, confirms that the journey took place in 1786, and that the major investor was Thomas Hind[e] junior. There are no other sailings by vessels invested in by the Hinde family which visited Dominica listed in that year.

Slave Voyages records that The Golden Age captained by William Jackson, set off from Liverpool on the 25^th of June 1786 and visited Bonny, an island off what is now Nigeria, where it picked up 731 enslaved people, landing with 670 survivors at St Domingo. However, a newspaper report of January 1787 contradicts that, stating that the ship arrived in Dominica with just 573 survivors which, if correct, would equate to the loss of 158 Africans on the voyage. The vessel arrived back at Liverpool on the 27^th of February 1787 – which explains why the Blackburn merchants were still awaiting delivery of the cotton in the 1786 ledger. The Manchester Mercury newspaper of 6^th March 1787 confirms that The Golden Age returned to Liverpool from Dominica carrying: “66 bales and packets of cotton, 23 tons of fustic, ten elephants’ teeth and Madeira Wine for Thomas Hinde & Co”. This is a particularly clear example of what some, even at the time, described as: ‘the nefarious trade’.

The second blog will focus on trade through the port of Lancaster.

A more local history focused article about English Ms 1199 can be found on the Cotton Town website.

With thanks to:
Dr Grant Collier (Curator, University Heritage, The John Rylands Library)
Dr Elizabeth Gow (Curator, English and European manuscripts, The John Rylands Library)
Mary Painter (Local History Librarian, Blackburn Library)

Sources:
University of Manchester Library Special Collections – English Ms 1199
University College London Centre for the Legacies of British Slavery website
Slave Voyages website: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database
Cotton Town website
Liverpool as a Trading Port Project website
Ancestry – Former British Colonial Dependences, Slave Registers, 1813-1834
Historical directories of Blackburn, Lancaster, Liverpool and London
William Abram – A History of Blackburn, Town and Parish (1877)
William Abram – Blackburn Characters of a Past Generation (1894)
John Baynes – The Cotton Trade Lectures (1857)
Sven Beckert – Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014)
Cumbria Archives – BDHJ/340/1/1 The will of Daniel Backhouse
BDHJ/388/27/3 The probate of Daniel Backhouse
Melinda Elder – Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18^th Century Lancaster (1992)
A Phelps, R Gregory, I Miller & C Wild (Eds) – The Textile Mills of Lancashire: The Legacy – Published by Historic England undated
D Richardson, S Schwarz & A Tibbles (Eds) – Liverpool & Transatlantic Slavery (2007)
Steven Toms – Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline 1780-2000 (2020) – in particular the chapter Industrialization and Capital Formation
AP Wadsworth & Julia de Lacy Mann – The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780 (1931)
Gomer Williams – History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744-1812 (2004)
Gordon Clark – ‘Lancaster and the Slave Trade’ (2021) Lancaster Civic Society Leaflet
Lancashire Archives – DDX 2261/23 Scorton Mill: An interim historical and archaeological record – Nigel Morgan
Lancaster University Special Collections – The Satterthwaite Letter Books
The Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire website holds several useful articles
‘The Captains of the British Slave Trade 1785-1807’ – Stephen D Behrendt
‘The Letter Book of Benjamin Satterthwaite’ – MM Schofield
‘The Slave Trade from Lancashire and Cheshire Ports 1750-1790’ – MM Schofield
‘The Flax Merchants of Kirkham’ – FJ Singleton (which holds details about the Birley family involvement in slavery and the interconnected businesses of the Birley, Hornby and Cardwell families)
‘Liverpool and the Slave Trade: A Guide to Resources’ – F E Sanderson
C KNick Harley: ‘Prices and Profits in Cotton Textiles During the Industrial Revolution’ – University of Oxford Discussion Paper (2010)
FE Hyde, BB Parkinson & S Marriner – ‘The Cotton Broker and the Rise of Liverpool Cotton Market’ – The Economic History Review Vol 8 No 1 1955
Digitised newspapers: The Barbadian, Blackburn Times, Blackburn Standard, Jamaica Royal Gazette, Manchester Courier, Manchester Guardian, The Pilot, Saunder’s Newsletter & Daily Advertiser