Liverpool's Role in the US Civil War

Liverpool in the 1860s

 

Unlike the rest of Britain, Liverpool’s population and economic status plummeted after World War Two. Go back 80 years further, though, and you have Britain’s second great metropolis, thriving off King Cotton and still benefitting hand-over-fist from the transatlantic slave trade. In modern terms, it would be a city of four million people, or nearly twice the size of Paris. A confident, arrogant world player grasping at city statehood.

Liverpool sucked money into its Cotton Exchange and banks directly from the trade winds and favourable currents from the new world. Traders got rich quick, but by 1863 something had stuck in the craw… those Damn Yankees. As a savage ground war ignited across the Eastern States of a still fledgling nation, the superior Union Navy blockaded all merchant traffic coming in and out of the South. Many leagues away in North-West England, a cotton drought set tempers boiling and the nouveau riche Illuminati of Liverpool rolled their stall out to scatter this blockade, by fair means and foul.

Britain’s official neutrality – Lincoln had explicitly warned the British Government against meddling – was flouted as the Confederate Navy was built, launched and crewed out of the city. Huge and notorious ironclad leviathans slipped out of the shipyard at Cammell Laird, steaming out into the Mersey bound for engagement. No expense was spared, and the South had been gifted the best technology of the day, with blockade runners like CSS Alabama and CSS Banshee becoming the scourge of the North. The Rebs suddenly had stock on water, and it came expressly from Liverpool.

Via deep-rooted trade connections, the city was deemed strategically essential to both sides in the war. The United States had long established a Consulate on Paradise Street, before the Confederacy – floated by local support – established its own base at Rumford Place and then Abercromby Square. A Cold War of espionage, legal challenges and sabotage began as agents (including a number of commissioned female agents) on both sides roamed the city and infiltrated the docks and ships.

Thomas Haines Dudley and James Dunwoody Bulloch

Two men infamously stood out in a growing ensemble American cast: Union Consul Thomas Haines Dudley, an erstwhile close aide of Lincoln who had a role in his election, and the formidable James Dunwoody Bulloch, Confederate Commander and Dudley’s counterpart at Rumford Place. Bulloch was the direct link in building the clandestine Navy, while Dudley challenged him in British courts and via his own network of agents who acted on the edge of local laws.

During the summer of 1863, in the run-up to Gettysburg, the pivotal battle stateside, Bulloch was succeeding in his charm offensive on the rich denizens of the city, via gentlemen’s clubs like the Athenaeum, which had a long association with slave traders. While anti-slavery campaigns were robust, former slavers had received vast sums in compensation and had reinvested their monies in the same dirty business, only at the import end of the supply chain. The CSS Alabama wreaked havoc on the blockade, and destroyed dozens of enemy vessels before finally succumbing at Cherbourg, more evidence that this war was fought on both sides of the ocean. 

 

The actions were not confined to the two senior rivals either. Key Lincoln assassination conspirator John Surratt hid out in the city for several months after the dirty deed, evading capture and extradition. Liverpool’s addiction to the vast wealth created by cotton drove the city’s fervent support of the Rebel Yell, and this included harbouring fugitives and spies like Surratt. Westminster did little to nothing in terms of disrupting this tryst, with rumours of collaborations between some senior politicians with investments tied up in Liverpool’s trading interests and the movement to back Richmond.

 

Irish Diaspora

 

An important backdrop to these events is that Liverpool’s dense population was swelled by the diaspora after the Great Irish Hunger in the 1840s, which meant that many of the commissioned agents and paid gangs originated from this generation of immigrants. Both sides in the war recruited vigorously in the city for their armies and navies. Irish fought on both sides and continued to build American cities as much as their labour built Liverpool. Ireland formed a bridge across the ocean, and Liverpool Irish were another essential link, taking up the lucrative but dirty work offered by Dudley and Bulloch at a time when any work was sought after. 

 

This nefarious cooperation of Liverpool and the Confederacy can be boiled down to an unerring truth; the American Civil War began with a shot fired from a giant gun built by a Duke Street ironmonger and ended in 1865 with the surrender of Liverpool-built CSS Shenandoah on the Mersey, with the last act of defiance coming with their acquiescing to the British rather than Union Navy.

 

After the War

 

Dunwoody Bulloch settled in the city after the war and is interred at Smithdown Road cemetery. Today, Liverpool redefines itself as a city of tolerance and as a proud, ancient melting pot with a strong urge towards social justice. City historians like Lawrence Westgaph and Malik Al Nasir have opened up long-closed archives that detail what happened before and after the war, particularly in terms of slavery, by following the money and proffering reparations for the middle passage Holocaust. Myths hang tight, and while the ideas behind the Confederacy maintain an allure to the alt-right in the US, the frequent appearance of a Confederate saltire on Bulloch’s resting place reminds us that maybe a few in Liverpool still wished that war had ended differently. The fundamental difference is that now they’re in a tiny minority.

 

About the Author

 

John Maxwell is the author of the Civil War thriller “Water Street”. 

 

Set in Liverpool in 1863, the American Civil War comes to the British Empire’s second city and the world’s richest port. Confederate Commander Banastre X. Dunwoody has a plan to turn the conflict by securing advanced warships, but the U.S. Government is one step ahead of him. It seeks to sabotage his efforts through its covert agent – Harriet Dunwoody – Banastre’s pregnant wife.

 

 

 

 

Playing the Provinces: 18th Century Actors on the Move, Part 1 (Liverpool & Manchester)

by Margaret Porter
During the Georgian era, the performance season at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, London's two Theatres Royal, concluded in June. Actors and actresses therefore sought employment elsewhere, resulting in mass migration of theatrical personnel towards provincial theatres. During the summer months, England's most celebrated players augmented their income in the distant cities in which they had first honed their talents. From afar they also negotiated their terms for the next London season, commencing in September.

Liverpool

 

Ned Shuter

From the 1750s, Liverpool's Drury Lane Theatre offered summer entertainment to prosperous visitors flocking there for the bathing season. As no playbills are extant, little is known about its company or the performances. In 1756 the newspaper alerted the public to the arrival of 'Comedians from the Theatres Royal in London at the Theatre in Liverpool. During the months of June, July, and August next, will be perform'd variety of the best plays. N.B. The days of acting will be Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.' On 4th June the season opened with The Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee, followed by the farce The Virgin Unmask'd. Seats in the pit cost two shillings and the gallery one shilling. At that time there were no boxes, although they were added during a subsequent renovation, with seats offered at three shillings. For many years the theatre attracted London players, including famous comic actor Ned Shuter as well as John Palmer, Thomas King, and Miss Pope.

The fortunes of the Liverpool theatre improved in 1771 when, by Act of Parliament, a licence was granted. In the Letters Patent, the location of the Theatre Royal would be Williamson Square.

Williamson Square, Liverpool

Facade of the Theatre Royal

  

After the opening 5th June, 1772,  the summer season proceeded  with a company populated primarily by London performers. In 1775 Charles Macklin appeared as Shylock, his most famous character. Prior to his retirement from the stage the great David Garrick also trod the boards in Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson. The Georgian theatre repertory relied heavily on plays from prior centuries.

 

Macklin as Shylock, The Merchant of Venice

 
During late 1770s, Sarah Kemble Siddons was a mainstay of the theatre. The daughter of provincial players, she had disappointed them by becoming an actress and compounded her error by wedding an actor. She began her career in provincial theatres and eventually David Garrick of Drury Lane hired her. After her inauspicious debut and departure after a single London season, she accepted employment in Liverpool, where her brother John Philip Kemble joined her.

 

Sarah Siddons & John Philip Kemble in Macbeth

In 1782 her second attempt to establish herself in London was hugely successful. After her metropolitan triumph, on her way to a summer engagement in Dublin, she stopped to perform in Liverpool. She returned in 1785, 1789, 1797, and 1809.

The popular comedienne Mrs Jordan performed there in 1786. She delighted local audiences as Hippolyta in She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not, and in The Romp, one of her most popular roles. 

Mrs Jordan as Hippolyta

Kemble, who had risen to succeed Garrick as actor-manager at London's Drury Lane, spent the summer of 1786 in Liverpool. Three years later he became a co-lessee (with Francis Aickin) of the Theatre Royal. In his diary he records: 'This day [1st January] I agreed to take the Liverpool Theatre with Mr F. Aickin for several years. Our rent is to be 360 Pounds per ann. We are to use the Theatre for six months of the twelve and are to pay down twelve hundred pounds for the purchase of wardrobe, etc.' He was present on 15th June to open its summer season with an address, but due to his London responsibilities was an absent manager, leaving most responsibilities to Aickin. Their partnership failed, and after losing money Kemble gave it up.

Harriot Mellon

Another player of that period who achieved popularity in Liverpool was Harriot Mellon, who wrote, 'When I was a poor girl, working very hard for my thirty shillings a week, I went down to Liverpool during the holidays [from London's Drury Lane], where I was always kindly received.' Harriot later wed her devoted and elderly admirer, wealthy banker Thomas Coutts. After his death she chose the much younger, impoverished Duke of St Albans as her second husband.

By 1803 the Theatre Royal had been rebuilt and given a graceful curved facade, reopening in June of that year. Actor Charles Mathews left a rich description of the theatre and his experiences in the city:

The theatre is beautiful...the prices are now lowered, and we play to houses of £90 or £100, which is thought to be bad; the pit is usually well attended. They had little opinion of any actor who has not appeared in London...The town I like; the situation is beautiful. I have ridden seven miles on the sands; the sea on one side, the town and harbour on the other. The opposite Cheshire coast and distant Welsh mountains for altogether a most enchanting prospect. Prince William [of Gloucester] is here....He has bespoken plays three times.

The improved theatre continued to draw the most eminent players of the late Georgian and Regency periods: Edmund Kean, Charles Mayne Young, Robert Elliston, George Frederick Cooke, Master Betty ('The Young Roscius'), and Miss O'Neill.

In the waning days of his long career John Philip Kemble returned for a farewell performance as Corialanus. On 12 July, 1816, in his remarks at the conclusion of the performance, he expressed his appreciation of the Liverpool audiences, emotion overcoming him as he declared:

Ladies and gentlemen, I have tonight appeared before you for the last time, and cannot take my leave without expressing my high sense of the liberal support that I have always received from you....It was on this stage that I first adapted this play of Shakespeare's for representation, and the success which it met with in the fostering smile of your approbation encouraged me to persevere in my profession and determined me to pursue an industrious and methodical study of my art....Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you all a very good night, and every prosperity and happiness to this town.

There remains a theatre in Williamson Square in a slightly different location. The site of the 18th century one now looks like this:

 

Manchester

An early theatre located at King and Marsden Streets housed a repertory company and occasionally hosted concerts, oratorios, balls, and auctions. In the summer of 1762 it welcomed the first London actors, 'His Majesty's Servants from the Theatres Royal,' who performed three times a week from June to September, and every night during the August race meeting.

In 1764 the theatre was described by Thomas Wilks (sometimes Snagg) as 'plain and unadorned, having been newly built....the manager had a room to himself, the first male performer likewise a separate room; the useful plebians, of which I made one, a general apartment for habiting. The heroines and principal ladies had likewise an attiring room, and the underlings their cockloft....'  The following summer an actress relatively new to London's Drury Lane established herself in Manchester, Mrs Baddeley, whom Wilks admired as 'an extremely beautiful woman. She played the ladies in most comedies and operas, and I...was often allotted to be her lover before the curtain, which brought an intimacy, with many a cup of tea and private walk with her, where I have been charmed with her melodious voice...I'll venture to say she was the best and most beautiful Ophelia I ever saw.' Nearly a decade passed before London players returned to Manchester.

In 1775, Lord Lyttelton sponsored a bill for a licenced Theatre Royal in Manchester: 'to establish a Theatre in Manchester, to keep a company of comedians for His Majesty's service, and to act such Tragegies, Plays, Operas, and Entertainments only as had been or should be licenced by the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household.' The licence was granted to Joseph Younger and George Mattocks (managers of the Liverpool theatre), and subscriptions were raised to construct a brick building at the corner of York Street and Spring Gardens, with boxes, pit, and gallery. The season in Manchester was not intended to overlap the summer season in Liverpool. 

Manchester's Theatre Royal, York Street & Spring Gardens

 
The theatre opened June 5, 1775, with Othello--Younger playing the lead. Performance nights were Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The regular season commenced the following October. Sarah Siddons and her brother John Kemble spent time at Manchester in the winter of 1776, as did Elizabeth Farren and Elizabeth Inchbald. All were destined to gain greater fame--and notoriety--in London. Farren left the Drury Lane stage to marry her lover, the Earl of Derby, and was transformed from actress to countess.

Elizabeth Farren

A German resident in the 1780s left a description of the theatre and its audiences:

The gallery is here, as everywhere in England, unbearably unashamed; they throw apples, pomegranates, nut-shells on the stage, in the pit and the boxes they cry out and make a lot of noise; I know people who refuse to sit in the front seat of the boxes. With ladies they are more polite. Many years ago a flask flew from the gallery into the pit, striking a man's skull. This shrieking and din and all this bad behaviour is difficult in the intervals...during the play itself the gallery is quieter than I have heard in any other place, and the applause and laughter in the middle of speeches does not last so long that one loses the thread or misses the climax...Of battles and murders they are especially fond.

The Liverpool company sometimes performed in Manchester during the summer, bringing with them luminaries from Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Those who turned up in Manchester included George Frederick Cooke and comedian Dicky Suett. John Philip Kemble returned in 1784 after achieving success in Dublin and prior to emulating his sister's fame in London. He reappeared periodically, whenever playing at Liverpool. In May 1785 his sister Sarah Siddons, by then London's leading actress, returned, prompting a sudden rise in prices for her two performances--to five, three, and two shillings for box, pit, and gallery respectively. 

Anna Maria Crouch

The Manchester theatre was rebuilt in 1790. The next year, playwright/librettist Charles Dibdin's son joined the company for its winter season. George Frederick Cooke was present, as he was in most years, for Race Week, and stayed on. In some years there was a brief September season. Kemble returned for Race Week in the summer of 1798. By this time, the theatre was often used in summer for special events--a one-off performance by a well-known player, or singers such as Charles Incledon, Michael Kelly, and Mrs Crouch, Mr and Mrs Charles Dibdin, and Madame Mara. 

Near the turn of the century John Ducrow 'The Flemish Hercules'--a clown who performed thrilling acrobatic feats--came to town. He posted a notice in the newspaper, informing the public of his intent in to display 'those wonderful leaps from the Trampoline in particular one over Eighteen Grenadiers, with shouldered firelocks and fixed bayonets; also through a hogshead of Real Fire, and will fly over a grand Pyramid of Light.'

A banking establishment was built on the site of Manchester's Theatre Royal, a building that has since become a restaurant.

Coming next: Part 2 of this article, featuring the theatres of York, Bristol and Bath, follows on 14 June 2016 and you can read it here.

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Margaret Porter is the award-winning and bestselling author of twelve period novels, whose other publication credits include nonfiction and poetry. A Pledge of Better Times, her highly acclaimed novel of 17th century courtiers Lady Diana de Vere and Charles Beauclerk, 1st Duke of St. Albans, is her latest release, available in trade paperback and ebook. Margaret studied British history in the UK and the US. As historian, her areas of speciality are social, theatrical, and garden history of the 17th and 18th centuries, royal courts, and portraiture. A former actress, she gave up the stage and screen to devote herself to fiction writing, travel, and her rose gardens.

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When Liverpool Went Dixie and Manchester Backed Lincoln

by David Chadwick

Britain’s influence on the American Civil War is hard to overstate, yet is often overlooked – while much the same can be said of the Civil War’s impact on Britain.

The Union, or North, went to war with the slaveholding Confederacy, or South, over the abolition of slavery on 12 April 1861. When the conflict ended four years later, it had cost more American lives than any other war in the country’s history – including both world wars and Vietnam. The extent to which Britain had blood on her hands is not widely known.

From the outset, Concerted Confederate attempts to acquire a British-built navy were met with equally determined resistance by the North. By October 1863 relations between the United States and Britain had reached breaking point.

In Britain, supporters of the Northern states believed a Union victory would help British workers to win the vote. Those who backed the Confederacy saw it as a bulwark against the mass democratic ‘mob rule’ they feared would upset the status quo in Britain.

The significance of the conflict in Britain was lucidly illustrated by an editorial in the London Times on August 21 1861: “The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny.”

Broadly speaking, the British working classes favoured the North, while the aristocracy backed the South. There were notable exceptions – for example, the Duke of Argyle’s ardent support for the Union. Nor was there anything like universal support for the North among the working classes.

Abraham Lincoln
President of the United States during the Civil War

At the heart of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery – a cause close to the hearts of the British people. They were proud of their country’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade and the eradication of bondage in the West Indies in 1833. As a result, slavery no longer had meaningful support in any section of British society.

Nonetheless, in Britain – as in America – the question of choosing sides was more complicated and nuanced than 150 years of hindsight might suggest.

British Liberals and Radicals found themselves in a particularly invidious position. Many had applauded the Greek struggle against the Ottoman Turks, as well as attempts by Hungarian patriots and Italian states to shake off the shackles of Hapsburg oppression. The Confederate rebellion was also seen as a just fight for self-government. The fly in the ointment was slavery – although until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 1863, it had been possible to argue that the North was not officially fighting for abolition.

Conservative supporters of the South were less conflicted – and drew strength from the argument that they were not supporting slavery, but rather opposing the Yankee democratic experiment. The Civil War itself, they argued, was a direct result of the failure of the republican form of government.

Some supporters of the Confederacy even promoted the notion that the American Civil War was a corollary of the English Civil Wars, with descendants of New England’s ‘Puritans and regicides’ pitted against ‘banished Cavaliers’ in the South. Nor was this view unreciprocated. In Virginia, Britain was often vaunted as the ‘mother country’ and transatlantic kinship – especially with the British aristocracy – was venerated.

Statue of Oliver Cromwell,
Victor of the English Civil Wars
at the British Houses of Parliament

Nowhere in Britain was the war across the Atlantic more vividly replicated, or opinions more sharply divided than in Lancashire’s two great cities of Liverpool and Manchester.

Liverpool owed much of its wealth to the slave trade. The city’s ships had transported an estimated 1.5 million Africans across the Atlantic into bondage before the transatlantic trade was abolished by Britain in 1807. When the Civil War broke out, Liverpool’s ties with the South were still strong and it was no surprise that ‘Liverpool went Dixie’.

Historians agree that events in Liverpool and Birkenhead in 1863 could have radically redirected the course of the Civil War. From a Liverpool office building nicknamed the ‘Confederate Embassy’, the Rebels came within a whisker of acquiring two ironclad battleships – known as the Laird rams – powerful enough to penetrate the Union navy’s blockade of southern ports.

If this had happened the South could have exported cotton to mills – including Lancashire’s – and used the funds raised to bring back vital war materials. Whether this in itself would have led to a Confederate victory is conjecture, but war with Britain (and possibly France, also hard hit by the cotton embargo) could certainly have altered the outcome of the conflict. In the event, British prime minister Lord Palmerston took a pragmatic view. He conceded to the demands of Charles Francis Adams, the US minister in London, and the ironclads were seized by the British authorities before they could leave the Mersey.

HMS Warrior, a new breed of ironclad battleship
at the time of the American Civil War

As well as the Laird rams, Mersey shipyards produced legitimate blockade runners and legally dubious commerce raiders: warships that were built, but not armed in Britain. They included the infamous CSS Alabama, which ranged the oceans of the world destroying Federal merchant ships and inflicting serious economic damage on the Union. The final Confederate act of the Civil War involved another well-known commerce raider, CSS Shenandoah, surrendering to British authorities at Liverpool Town Hall on November 6 1865.

Liverpool Town Hall, scene of the final Confederate surrender

Unlike Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire’s big textile towns were heavily reliant on cotton imported from southern plantations. When the Union navy’s blockade stopped the flow of raw material, these factory workers faced severe hardship.

Before the Civil War, Lancashire imported 75 per cent of all cotton produced by southern plantations (1.3 billion lbs). After 12 months of fighting, 60 per cent of the county’s spindles and looms stood idle and many operatives had lost their jobs.

Workers in parts of Lancashire hardest hit by this ‘cotton famine’ called for Britain to recognise the Confederacy, though their actions were driven by the need to put food on the table rather than any fondness for slavery. Moreover, many cotton industry operatives continued to back Lincoln’s Union, despite their own privations.

At a meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in December 1862, workers agreed to continue backing the cotton embargo and sent a message of support to Lincoln. In January 1863, the president replied by acknowledging the self-sacrifice of ‘the working men of Manchester’ and praising them for their ‘sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country’.

Soon afterward, the arrival in Britain of Union relief ships, loaded with provisions, represented an act of unity between the northern states and Lancashire’s cotton workers.

There is no doubt that Britain’s Confederate sympathisers antagonised Northern politicians, resulting in strained Anglo-American relations in the years following the Civil War. Nonetheless, it became increasingly apparent that the common interests of Britain and the USA outweighed their differences – especially with the emergence of a unified Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

The ‘Confederate Embassy’
in Liverpool

The resolution of the Alabama claims dispute in 1871-72 resulted in Britain compensating the USA for damage inflicted on its merchant fleet by British-built Confederate commerce raiders, including the CSS Alabama. The peaceful settlement of these claims set an important precedent for solving international disputes through arbitration and resulted in a substantial, long-term strengthening of relations between Britain and the United States.

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David Chadwick’s novel, Liberty Bazaar, is set in Liverpool during the American Civil War and is told through the eyes of an escaped slave girl and a battle-fatigued Confederate general. It has received a rarely awarded Kirkus Reviews star and praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James M. McPherson, as well as leading African American historian Richard Blackett.

A professional journalist and PR adviser, David took a BA in history and politics at Queen Mary, University of London, followed by an MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has worked in Liverpool and Manchester and has undertaken detailed research into the histories of the rival cities.

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You can find out more about David as well as the people and issues behind Liberty Bazaar at his website or his Facebook page.