carpenters, and bricklayer George Howell, demonstrated that they were responsible people, concerned to improve standards for the workers and to reform Parliament by legal means, not by revolution. They were in contact with Radical MPs, and succeeded in impressing a large section of the Liberal party, and many of the Conservatives as well, with their sense of responsibility. As early as 1861, working men in Leeds were organizing reform conferences, and in March 1864, the Reform Union, an alliance of middle- and working-class reformers, was set up at a meeting in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. (d) the American Civil War (1861-5) was an important external stimulus For most Radicals this was a simple case of freedom (the North) struggling to assert itself against tyranny and slavery (the South), and the war provided splendid publicity for the idea of equal rights and opportunities within a nation. The war had another effect: the northern blockade of southern ports cut off cotton supplies to the industrial towns of Lancashire, bringing serious unemployment and hardship during late 1861 and right through 1862. Yet by the end of 1862, as the cotton workers realized that the North stood for the abolition of slavery, they swung their support firmly behind the North, whose warships were the direct cause of their distress. This reaction impressed many politicians as a sign of working-class political maturity. (e) Gladstone was converted to the idea of reform Eventually, Gladstone was persuaded by the logic of the arguments put forward by Radicals and trade unionists and he accepted the need for reform. He first revealed his change of mind publicly in the Commons in 1864 when he said: ‘Every man who is not incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution.’ This angered his Prime Minister, Palmerston, who was still against reform and who retorted, ‘I entirely deny that every sane man has a moral right to a vote.’ Gladstone’s approval of the Lancashire cotton workers’ political maturity led him to declare that it was ‘a shame and a scandal