By 1862, the Union navy’s blockade of Confederate ports had effectively cut off the export of raw cotton. One unintended harm was that hundreds of thousands of British textile workers in England’s northwest cotton manufacturing district in and around Lancashire were thrown out of work or onto starvation wages.
By the time of the U.S. Civil War, the mill towns surrounding Lancashire—spurred by its revolutionary mechanized spinning and weaving technology, damp climate (good for handling cotton thread without its snapping), its efficient network of canals and railways, cheap coal, and with the port of Liverpool as an import hub–had become the center of the world’s cotton textile industry. However, the American South supplied nearly 80% of the raw cotton entering Lancashire and alternative sources from Egypt, India, or Brazil, both smaller in supply and more expensive, couldn’t scale up fast enough to make up for the losses incurred by the blockade. The region collapsed in what became known as the Cotton Famine.
Many mill owners, whose fortunes depended on the free flow of cotton, pressed the British government to intervene against the blockade or to recognize the Confederacy. They demanded their workers stand behind them. Much of the liberal press sided with the owners, as did influential local political and community leaders, and many mill workers themselves, all of which added greater pressure on those mill workers who had not joined the owners in common cause. On top of it all, there were other more devasting pressures as well. With the region’s economic failure, the mill workers were cast into severe poverty. Many faced starvation, lack of heating, the humiliation of the Poor Laws, health crises, eviction, and sometimes even violence from those siding with the owners.
Despite these threats and deprivations, in an extraordinary act of moral courage, most cotton workers not only refused to join the owners but publicly broke with them. At a mass meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on New Years Eve, 1862, a “Committee of Workingmen” resolved to send Abraham Lincoln a letter of support, explicitly endorsing emancipation and the Union cause—not just despite, but also because of their own privation. The workers, through their reduction to dependency, through having their labor and livelihood controlled by forces outside their say, and through their general helplessness, discovered in their own experience something like the standing to address an American president on behalf of a people in bondage. The Lancashire workers didn’t claim equivalency with the slave—they understood wage unemployment isn’t the same as the chattel system—but the degradation of powerlessness had become less abstract. They urged Lincoln “not to faint in [his] providential mission” but to push for “immediate and total emancipation” to ensure “the erasure” of slavery—which they called a “foul blot upon civilization and Christianity.” They encouraged the president, “we are truly one people, though locally separate…our interests are identified with yours.” In response, Lincoln offered heart-felt gratitude to the mill workers for what he called an act of “sublime Christian heroism,” praising their willingness to endure hardship rather than demand a policy that would have relieved their own suffering while leaving untouched the suffering of others.
While the similarities between that time and now are not entirely comprehensive, something like the spirit of the Lancashire mill workers was brought to mind last Friday by President Trump during his brief comments about the Iran war in his speech at the Nassau County Policy Academy on Long Island, in which he called on the American people to accept hardship as the cost of doing something both necessary and good. “We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he stressed, reasserting, again, the primary aim of his war against the mullahs in Tehran. In doing so, he did two things at once.
First, he seemed to directly contradict a statement made the day before by the vice president, who appeared to shift the administration’s messaging by declaring that reducing the cost of fuel for the American people was now “goal number one,” while preventing a nuclear-armed Iran had dropped to “goal number two.” More importantly, though tied together, the president’s rhetoric suggests he is unwilling to allow domestic economic stressors to dilute his focus on victory and finishing the job. Rather than trying to manage voter anger—and while cognizant of the financial impact on those voters—he framed any temporary economic hardship as comparatively minor when placed alongside the potential threat. We might have to pay a “little bit more” at the pump, he acknowledged, but we’re “doing it so that a very evil country” cannot have a nuclear weapon. Preventing that calamity, he encouraged Americans, is a “great service for the world.”
While not exactly unique in the history of American presidential rhetoric, it is at least unusual in a modern political era too-often characterized by near-constant campaign messaging to request of the American public something so practically unpopular. American presidents frequently call for general resilience during crises, but it’s relatively rare for a president to explicitly ask the public to accept economic pain. Following the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush called Americans to patience, increased vigilance, and the acceptance of increased security measures. Admittedly, asking us to endure the TSA was a pretty big ask, but, famously, instead of also asking us to accept economic hardship he urged us to go shopping. After Putin invaded Ukraine, President Biden warned Americans that defending global democracy carried costs. After acknowledging that sanctions would yield higher domestic gas prices, he framed it as unavoidable and something he was actively trying to fix. He was rather apologetic about it. I don’t mean to draw cavernous distinctions here, but there is something refreshing in President Trump acknowledging pain-at-the-pump while insisting he was not going to apologize for higher prices because what he is doing is right to do. If Jimmy Carter was the last president to boldly call American’s to “accept a little suffering” for the long-term good of the nation, it was also Carter’s calls for that sacrifice that at least contributed to his political defeat.
The question of the novelty of Trump’s bluntly stated willingness to allow us to hurt a little aside, he is right to be willing for us to hurt a little. It should be beyond argument that the present regime in Tehran must never acquire nuclear weapons. Their own history provides the best evidence for this assertion. From their very beginning in 1979 and going forward, the Mullah’s have attempted to make good on their pledge to destroy America, the Great Satan, through a continuous campaign utilizing direct military action, cyber warfare, state-sponsored terror networks, and assassination plots. Add to this the ongoing Iranian threats against U.S. partners and friends in the region, including, most obviously, against Israel, which Tehran has pledged to drive into the sea. At the very beginning of this war, against this ritualistically unrelenting, systematic threat, President Trump outlined a clear set of aims: destroy the Iranian nuclear program once and forever; destroy the Iranian ballistic missile threat that was quickly becoming not just a conventional threat against regional partners but a genuine deterrent against anyone interfering with the regime’s nuclear ambitions, destroy the Iranian Navy so that it could not threaten shipping and international commerce, and destroy Iran’s ability to fund and support proxy terror networks.
It’s clear that while enormous gains have been made, significant challenges remain. Most notably, Iran’s ballistic missile program has proved resilient, and they have been able to continue to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Supporting this, their mobile weapons—like the Shahed munitions—are exceptionally easy to hide and to quickly deploy against shipping, the rugged coastline allows the regime to effectively camouflage drones and mobile batteries with direct line-of-sight to passing tankers, and fast, small, armed speedboats continue to carry out intermittent harassment operations. In short, Iranian threats have been significantly suppressed but not eradicated.
Trump needs time. And time takes time. All indicators strongly suggest the Iranian regime is currently facing an economic catastrophe. The American blockade has choked off oil revenues, leading to hyperinflation, worthless currency, and a record misery index. Mass unemployment, industrial damage, and assets seizure has left the regime cash-strapped and unable to levy taxes effectively—mostly because it’s always hard to get blood from a rock.
While the impact of Lancashire’s support of President Lincoln on his ability to prosecute the Union’s war or to continue the blockade is contested, it seems clear that it had at least a measurable effect on helping to prevent then Prime Minister Palmerston from declaring war on the United States or effectively supporting the Confederacy. Suggesting that the mill worker’s courage kept Britain out of the war is probably too simplistic, but it contributed to the failure of the Confederacy’s efforts to secure Britain’s support. That harms Southern morale even as it emboldens Northern. That’s not nothing. More intangibly, but no less significantly, it also seems clear that the mill workers’ letter put some steel in the spine of the U.S. president. Deepened resolve is also not nothing. If the American public demonstrated widespread willingness to accept economic hardship—primarily by enduring high energy costs and the consequent rise in food and other costs—it might fundamentally reshape or stiffen the administration’s strategic calculus, giving President Trump the runway he needs to sustain the war of attrition against the Iranian regime. With Iran’s chief weapon being their ability to inflict economic pain by choking off the Strait of Hormuz, if Americans collectively signaled their willingness to absorb this pain, then the mullah’s primary leverage is neutralized. Backed by a willing American public, Trump could ignore artificial diplomatic deadlines and simply refuse to make dangerous concessions, allowing the U.S. blockade to slowly exhaust the regime. Because a prolonged war requires sustained enforcement of secondary sanctions, which often harms American allies and raises the prices of consumer goods, public tolerance for these harms will allow the administration to do what it needs to do to keep its foot on the throat of the mullahs. Because this conflict has created a severe logistical bottleneck, a supporting public gives Trump and congressional leaders more confidence that they can divert tax dollars into rapid defense production—giving the Pentagon the runway it needs to responsibly escalate military pressure. Finally, regimes like Iran always rely on the belief that democracies are soft and lack the stomach for long-term, painful grinds. A reasonably unified American public might shatter the regime’s hopes of winning a war of nerves. Their loss of morale would be a beautiful thing to behold.
Another lesson that rose out of Lancashire’s morally courageous act is really a reminder of what should be both obvious and common sense: a public’s morally courageous willingness to suffer economic hardship—even in the cause of justice—will always affect the poor worst of all. Much of Britain rallied around those struck by the cotton famine. Soup kitchens, job programs, and other acts of rescue and relief multiplied. In America, those who can ought to do what they can to improve the ability of those harder off to endure economic pain. State and local governments should continue to expand utility bill subsidies, public transit funding, and fuel funds to support those most in need; private corporations and employers should continue apace the rolling back of return-to-work policies to support hybrid and remote work options and offer, when they can, fuel stipends to allow employees to save at the pump. Churches and non-profit organizations should also offer emergency fuel and utility funds when able, expand food pantries, and seek other remedies. All of these measures—if responsibly and efficiently pursued—can signal to Tehran that Americans support their defeat. Charity can become a force multiplication measure. Neighbor love can be a combat multiplier.
To be sure, it will be hard for many to see an easy parallel between the magnanimity of the cotton workers’ willingness to suffer economic hardship to have some hand in ending chattel slavery and the willingness of Americans—including financially strapped Americans—to support this Administration’s war in Iran. For the reasons above, I think I’ve made clear that supporting the war—particularly with the president’s relatively modest aims—is easy to make. Certainly, it would be easier still if, at the end of all this, we had cause to hope that we could welcome the Iranian people back to the free world. While regime collapse has never been a direct goal of this administration, there is much that the president has done, can do, and can continue to do to encourage it. The decapitation strike at the beginning of the war was not without real hope that Khamenei’s killing would galvanize the regime’s opposition into rioting. Following this, the targeted strikes against other regime leaders were aimed not just at punishing culpable individuals but to further try to inspire protesters. While these actions appear to have had little direct impact, similar calculated strikes ought to continue. The Administration and its allies must find other ways to encourage the opposition’s—and change the regime’s—cost-benefit analysis on crackdowns. Presumably, as U.S. officials continue to intensify economic pressure, disrupt Iran’s oil exports, and degrade its military capabilities, America and its allies are also continuing to cultivate contacts inside the regime, to encourage opposition groups—including by helping them to maintain access to internet and other communications and by revisiting considerations of support for armed opposition factions. One hopes we are trying to create fractures between the National Army and the IRGC, including by credibly signaling a willingness to grant amnesty and safe passage out of Iran for political or military leaders—and their families—who either walk away or help with a popular uprising.
The Trump administration’s path toward victory against Tehran, including its regime-collapse strategy—has oscillated with changing fortunes on the ground between U.S. and partner military force, military-inspired uprisings, back-channel and direct negotiations, and economic strangulation. Trump’s call for Americans to suffer a bit at the pump to do something worth doing—and good not just for America but the free world and the people of Iran—ought to result in a show of unified, public, American support for the defeat of Tehran. Doing so might remove one variable from the president’s calculations. He should know that Americans are willing to give him and our military leaders the space and time to do what needs to be done. Doing so might also signal to the Iranian people that their interests are our interests. Doing so might give the president the room he needs to focus on a strategy to get the job done and bring this thing to a responsible end.
Were he able to do so, history just might repeat itself, a great good worth doing might have been done, and we’d all be walking in high cotton.