The historical student will find but few such British utterances at the moment, and these few not by men of great weight either in politics or in commerce.  The South was labouring under an obsession and prophesied results accordingly.  So strong was this obsession that governmental foreign policy neglected all other considerations and the first Commission to Europe had no initial instructions save to demand recognition[662].  The failure of that Commission, the prompt British acquiescence in the blockade, were harsh blows to Southern confidence but did not for a long time destroy the faith in the power of cotton.  In June, 1861, Bunch wrote that there was still a firm belief that “Great Britain will make any sacrifice, even of principle or of honour, to prevent the stoppage of the supply of cotton,” and he enclosed a copy of an article in the Charleston Mercury of June 4, proclaiming:  “The cards are in our hands, and we intend to play them out to the bankruptcy of every cotton factory in Great Britain and France, or the acknowledgment of our independence[663].”  As late as March, 1862, Bunch was still writing of this Southern faith in cotton and described the newly-made appointment of Benjamin as Secretary of State as partly due to the fact that he was the leader of the “King Cotton” theory of diplomacy[664].  It was not until the war was well nigh over that British persistence in neutrality, in spite of undoubted hardships caused by the lack of cotton, opened Southern eyes.  Pollard, editor of a leading Richmond newspaper, and soon unfriendly to the administration of Jefferson Davis, summed up in The Lost Cause his earlier criticisms of Confederate foreign policy: 

“‘Cotton,’ said the Charleston Mercury, ’would bring England to her knees.’  The idea was ludicrous enough that England and France would instinctively or readily fling themselves into a convulsion, which their great politicians saw was the most tremendous one of modern times.  But the puerile argument, which even President Davis did not hesitate to adopt, about the power of ‘King Cotton,’ amounted to this absurdity:  that the great and illustrious power of England would submit to the ineffable humiliation of acknowledging its dependency on the infant Confederacy of the South, and the subserviency of its empire, its political interests and its pride, to a single article of trade that was grown in America[665]!”

But irrespective of the extremes to which Southern confidence in cotton extended the actual hardships of England were in all truth serious enough to cause grave anxiety and to supply an argument to Southern sympathizers.  The facts of the “Lancashire Cotton Famine” have frequently been treated by historians at much length[666] and need here but a general review.  More needed is an examination of some of the erroneous deductions drawn from the facts and especially an examination of the extent to which the question of cotton supply affected or determined British governmental policy toward America.