This blog post quotes from historical sources that contain racist and dehumanising language. The University of Manchester does not condone this language, but is committed to providing access to this material as evidence of the inequalities and attitudes of the time period.
The previous blogs have outlined slavery in the origins of the cotton bought by Blackburn merchants Richard Cardwell, Richard Birley and John Hornby, as evidenced by English Ms 1199 Messrs Cardwell, Birley And Hornby: Stock and Ledger Books – Wadsworth Manuscripts – Archives Hub. This blog highlights how the partners and their families also profited more directly from the trading in and exploitation of enslaved Africans, sets out how they used that money, and shows its local and international impact.
The 1797 section of the second ledger shows that the Blackburn cotton merchants owed ‘Tarleton and Backhouse’ £1707. This is John Tarleton junior, the son of another slave trader John Tarleton senior (who passed away in 1777), and Daniel Backhouse, whose company invested in more than 100 triangular voyages from Liverpool, and who both owned plantations in the West Indies. John Hornby married Alice Backhouse, the daughter of Daniel. When Daniel died in 1811, Hornby inherited some of his vast wealth in the form of cash, as well as a portion of: ‘…my plantations, estates, lands, tenements, hereditaments, slaves, negroes and their increase and progeny…’ John Hornby is listed on the Legacies of British Slavery website as later receiving almost £1,300 in post-abolition reparations for enslaved people on the Rabot Estate of St Lucia. In the third ledger (1813-1858), there are three entries which show that the Blackburn cotton merchants owed money to the ‘the executors of Daniel Backhouse’. The first has the company owing the then not insubstantial sum of just over £784. However, the second has the company indebted to the tune of £14,048 – which now equates to over £1 million. Precisely what this money is connected with is difficult to decipher at this remove, but it would have equated to an awful lot of cotton – if that’s what it was for.
Langton, Birley & Co. – a company which previously included John Shepherd, an earlier partner in the Blackburn cotton merchant business – appear throughout the ledgers. By 1780 it was based in Kirkham, Lancashire, with partners of Thomas Langton, his two sons John & William, alongside John (1747-1831) and William Birley (1750-1792), brothers of Richard Birley. Thomas Langton invested in Liverpool slave ships in the 1760s and 1770s and, although the About – Slave Voyages website contains no record of it, research elsewhere confirms that his son John Langton also invested in the triangular trade out of Liverpool. The father of Richard and John Birley – another John (1710-1767) – earlier owned the slave ship Hothersfall, the Birley family named as ‘West India Merchants’ and slavers in research, while John junior later invested in slave ships sailing from Poulton and Liverpool.
Legacies of British Slavery research lists a John Langton as owner of a Jamaican plantation and a William Langton with an estate on the island of Trinidad, both receiving post-abolition payments for enslaved people. Although researchers have not connected them with the partners of Langton, Birley & Co., it seems likely that they are one and the same. The fact that Margaret Hornby, cousin of John Hornby and wife of William Langton, is confirmed on the same website as receiving £125 in reparations for enslaved people in Jamaica, indicates that there is a connection.
John Birley married Margaret Backhouse, another daughter of Daniel, and received a share of his wealth derived from slavery and plantations with enslaved people. It is not clear from the ledgers what products or services Langton, Birley & Co. provided to the Blackburn merchants, but it is likely to have been shipping cotton – possibly from their own plantations and others in the Caribbean.
There are several payments in the first ledger to other individuals and companies involved in shipping. John Owen Parr & Co., Liverpool sailcloth suppliers, received money from the Blackburn merchants, as did William Jepson (1736-1816), a Lancaster Quaker and sailcloth manufacturer. Later a prominent abolitionist, Jepson recorded the details of slave trading voyages from the city, used by researchers into the triangular trade. Amongst several payments to ship captains are those to John Borrowdale of Whitehaven, Liverpool’s John Fisher, Robert Loxham and John Greenwood, a Captain Hippenstall of London and ‘Bruce of Bristol’, probably James Bruce, who captained slave trading vessels to and from the West Indies. So, why were Blackburn cotton merchants buying sailcloth and paying ship captains? The logical conclusion is that Cardwell, Hornby & Birley were more directly involved in the shipping of cotton than has previously been considered and, judging by the names of those they were paying, quite possibly the slave trade too.
Joseph Feilden, who invested in the Scorton mill of Cardwell, Hornby and Birley and who owned the warehouse used by the company, is listed on Legacies of British Slavery as being paid almost £3,500 in post-abolition reparations. The records show that Feilden claimed for his portion of a partnership which had 726 enslaved people on the Green Park and Spring Vale Pen plantations in Jamaica. Edward Cardwell (1st Viscount Cardwell, 1813-1886), son of Richard, married into the Parker family, which received tens of thousands of pounds in reparations. So, members of the Hornby, Birley, Feilden, Cardwell and Shepherd families are all recorded as profiting from enslaved people, but what did they do with that money?
Shortly after receiving enormous wealth from the Backhouse estate, John Hornby constructed Brookhouse Mill in Blackburn, which would become one of the largest cotton manufacturing plants in Britain, further developed by his son William Henry Hornby (1805-1884). The sons of Richard, Hugh Hornby Birley (1778-1845) and Joseph (1827-1881), initially became partners in the Blackburn cotton merchant business before moving to Manchester, where they used their wealth to build a large mill in Chorlton. William (1772-1850), Henry (1818-1875) and John Feilden (1804-1861) – the sons of Joseph – used their wealth to construct George Street West Mill.
So, much of the money which was made through slavery was re-invested into the cotton manufacturing trade in Blackburn and Manchester, which boomed in the early part of the nineteenth century. According to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), this drove the increase in the numbers of enslaved people needed in the southern US states, as plantation owners struggled to keep up with Britain’s demand for cotton. The money made from post-abolition reparations, combined with profits made from enslavement, was used to develop a British cotton manufacturing boom which then spurred an increase in US slavery.
The six ledgers include an annual stock take, each ending with an agreement signed by Cardwell, Hornby & Birley, outlining what should happen to the business in the event of one of them dying or the partnership being dissolved. In his notes, Wadsworth writes: ‘There is one astonishing sentence, which occurs 3 times, about the division of the work people at a death or end of partnership; they might be slaves on a cotton plantation’. Certainly, the number of ‘employees’ outlined in these agreements bears no relation to the amount of people working for the company in Lancashire, so Wadsworth seems valid to question to whom they referred. Perhaps some of the enslaved people, later claimed for by the cotton merchants and their families, were in fact part of the Blackburn business.
With the vast profits that they made, the Cardwell, Hornby, Birley and Feilden families built themselves huge mansions in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside – away from the increasing pollution created by cotton industrialisation. Newspaper reports show that Hornby, Birley and Feilden invested in the infrastructure of Blackburn, building a canal, railways and roads to assist the movement of raw cotton into the town and the finished goods away, for sale in the UK and overseas. Joseph Feilden and his heirs used substantial amounts of this income to fund the construction of many of the town’s Church of England schools and chapels while his and the Hornby children used the wealth to buy up much of the land on which the town stood, again purchased from the C of E, and which they gradually sold off as Blackburn developed. The Feilden and Hornby families also financed the building of an ornate town hall, grammar school, cotton exchange, two large public parks, a hospital, technical college and a library (now museum) with business profits derived both directly and indirectly from exploiting the enslaved.
For acknowledgements and a list of resources, please see the end of Blog 1.
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