This chapter focusses on cotton’s role in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States during the American Civil Car, and how this informed poetic discourse on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed both sides of the conflict. The first section, entitled, “The Confederate View,” examines Confederate poetry’s reflection of the power of cotton as a global bargaining tool, and subsequent recognition that British military intervention would not be forthcoming. The second section, “Brother Jonathan and John Bull,” referring to popular personifications of national identities, discusses transatlantic poetic discourse during the American Civil War as reflected in Union-supporting poetry, taking into account unfolding events through the conflict including the political rupture of the Trent Affair of November 1861. The third section is “Slavery and Lincoln’s Letter,” which consists of an examination of how poetry on both sides of the Atlantic reflected broader cultural discourse by placing slavery closer to the centre of the discussion in the closing years of the war, and how the aid ship the George Griswold helped to turn British public opinion.