 By the 1850s , cheap Southern cotton fueled the industries of Europe . The mills of Britain , developed during the first half of the 19th century , by 1860 used more cotton than the rest of the industrialized world combined . Cotton imports to Britain came almost entirely from the American South . According to an article in The Economist in 1853 , " let any great social or physical convulsion visit the United States , and England would feel the shock from Land 's End to John O 'Groat 's . The lives of nearly two million of our countrymen ... hang upon a thread . " 
