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You realize of course that there was a glut of cotton in England in 1861 ...

Bullsh*t. There was a severe cotton shortage crises at British mills in 1861.

and the British were turning to India and other sources.

*BECAUSE* there was a crises in the supply of cotton! Not because they had too much of it!

Why was their a crises in the supply of Cotton? Because US Warships had cut off all shipping of cotton to England to prevent the Southern states from establishing direct trade with Europe which would *CUT OUT* the Corrupt Washington DC establishment and the New York Crony Capitalists influencing the government from their previously cut of Southern/European trade.

First thing Lincoln did was stop trade between the Southern states and England. It was all about the money. It was never about moral issues.

King Cotton’s reign was ending and those big extra profits would have never happened.

"King Cotton" was assassinated. Without Lincoln's interdiction stopping trade, it was literally impossible for Europe to find cheaper sources of cotton than slave labor.

Now if you can explain to me how paid labor in India and Egypt could provide lower prices than slave labor, I would like to hear it, but it looks to me that without Lincoln stopping the trade, Cotton would have continued to be bought from the South in large quantities by the Europeans.

“In fact, much of the 1861 crop was burned in an effort to produce a faster shortage in Great Britain. But the Confederates didn't count on a couple of factors.

A major factor was that the 1860 crop, which had been a very large one, had already been shipped and Britain had stockpiles on hand from the late antebellum years. So there was a little bit of a cushion for the British there. Also, bumper crops from the later 1850s had left Great Britain with a surplus at the outset of the Civil War...

...It wasn't until the second half of 1862 that a pinch began to be felt in Britain. Britain imported only about one percent as much Southern cotton as it had imported in the last antebellum shipments...

...But, the strategy was doomed in the long term. First, Britain developed alternate sources of cotton—by 1864, British imports had reached 75% of their antebellum average, most of the new cotton coming from India and Egypt...

...And, there was also an increasing volume of American cotton coming into Britain from ports controlled by the United States military as the war went on. Some cotton would come out of ports that the U.S. controlled...

...Thus, despite the promise of its effectiveness, the ‘King Cotton’ strategy didn't work out for the Confederacy, as it had hoped. Along with that, any hopes of it getting recognition from the European powers were also wiped out.”

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/american-civil-war-the-confederacys-king-cotton-diplomacy/

When discussing historical matters, it helps to know what the f*ck you're talking about.

A similar topic is still discussed in our own day: whether peasant small cultivators of crops like cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa and rubber can compete with large plantations that pay poorly or not at all. There may be economies of scale that make the big operation cheaper per units produced. But living standards and costs in developing countries are low. An African, Asian or Latin American peasant family doesn't need to make big profits. They just need enough to stay alive and keep the farm going.

Rates of exchange matter a lot. If your currency isn't worth much on the international market, you might well be able to compete with large operations, even large slaveowner operations. Land and soil management is also a factor. A lot depends on whose operation degrades the soil and whose enriches it. American plantation owners could also count on having more land than the cultivated and moving to new plots when the old soil was exhausted. But all in all, whether Egyptians or Indians could outcompete the American slaveowners is not a simple question question to answer.

Cotton factors (also called cotton brokers or commission merchants) weren't all Northerners by any means. The idea that Yankees fanned out all over the South to buy up every last bole and bale and ship it away is a little silly. Most of the factors were Southern and had offices in Southern cities. Some of them bought and shipped cotton directly to Northern or European factories. But they also were looking to find the market where cotton would bring the most money.

New York City was the center of shipping, insurance, and finance. It was easier to finance and insure ships sailing from the place where the money was. There were other speculators in the city willing to buy the cotton in hopes of selling it for still more money. That was what they spent their lives doing, and it would have been foolish to expect them to buy high and sell low to satisfy the planters' ideas of economic justice. Ships that took cotton from New York city could count on bringing large quantities of European goods on the return trip. The New York metropolitan area had a large population and the city was connected to others by an extensive railroad network. No Southern city could compete with New York in terms of market size.

I believe Southerners had the option of using Canadian or West Indian ships for coastal shipping. My understanding is that these were exempt from the restrictions imposed on ships from the British Isles. But they don't appear to have used that option. They did ship directly to Britain and Europe. That they didn't ship more is as likely to be the result of New York City's commercial advantages than of any nefarious legislation. They could also have spun and woven their own cotton, but they chose not to do that on any large scale either.

Several chapters of a relevant book are available here: Fair to Middlin': The Antebellum Cotton Trade of the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River Valley. Ships could leave the small port of Appalachicola directly to Europe or to Boston and Providence for the textile mills in the area. That so many went to New York was because of the economic advantages of doing so.

There's a shell game in which people enjoy the advantages of government policies that benefit them and cry "free market" about those that they believe don't benefit them. Don't be naïve and take such claims at face value.