Browse Items (72 total)

Abraham Lincoln to William Kellogg, rejecting his attempts to secure a cotton permit for former Illinois legislator, Amos Babcock. Lincoln scolded Kellogg for his single-minded pursuit of a permit and observed the corruption already associated with…

38th Congress Committee on Commerce Investigative Report to accompany Bill H. R. No. 805; Investigating Trade with Confederate States.

Excerpts from a speech delivered in the senate before the civil war, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond warned of dire consequences if the south was unable to deliver cotton to the world.

Major General Samuel Curtis flatly denied any speculation, profiteering, or abuse of power in his letter to Commissary of Subsistence Richard McAllister. Curtis attributes the charges to "an infernal conspiracy" and is adamant that he never sold any…

This report in the Boston Daily Advertiser used the Manchester Cotton Report to estimate the amount of cotton that had evaded the Union blockade.

Major General Nathaniel P. Banks wrote to Lincoln in late 1863 to urge caution in the cotton trade. Banks was adamant that no amount of profit could counterbalance the certain wrong of finding "the munitions of war furnshed [sic] to the Rebels."

Quartermaster Lewis B. Parsons wrote to share his observations of the cotton trade in occupied territory. Considering the widespread speculation in cotton among officers, he recommended that all cotton be declared the property of either the federal…

A letter from William Rathbone V, a wealthy Liverpool merchant and politician, to his son William Rathbone VI, noting distress among the poor in Liverpool.

This brick outline marks the the present-day site where New Amsterdam's City Hall formerly stood.

Engraving for Harper's Weekly of cotton and sugar brought out to be sold after the fall of Memphis to the Union Army.