ABSTRACT
During the Cotton Famine, Dean Francis Close, an evangelical rector of Cheltenham and Dean of Carlisle, vacationed on the Isle of Wight. From his vacation oasis, he wrote to the operatives about what he saw as the causes of the Cotton Famine. Dean Henry Hart Milman was a Church of England cleric and writer. The Dean of a Cathedral Church has his duty in his cathedral, and Dean Close has not always quite managed to keep the peace with his own choir-masters and singing men. The cotton famine ‘is a clear visitation of God for our sins.’ Why? Because our sins, which are not denied, are contemporaneous with the cotton famine. General Butler and General Mitchell are as much God’s own purpose and intention, and instruments invented and designed for this one exceptional purpose, as the famine itself.
