Liverpool: The Confederate Navy’s Unofficial Overseas Base
Ian Poole, Collections Assistant
Throughout the American Civil War, the Confederate States struggled to build, supply, and equip its small navy. Domestic manufacturing in the South was still in its infancy, which slowed and ultimately limited the number of ships put into service. Though few in number, many of these warships were innovative and managed to secure multiple early victories against the more conventional and outdated wooden fleet of the US Navy. The Confederacy was spurred on by the success of their small fleet but incapable of producing enough ships to truly challenge the US Navy which by 1862 consisted of over 400 vessels. With their ports blockaded and their resources strained, Confederate shipbuilders looked overseas to neutral countries for support.
Although Great Britain had officially declared its neutral position in the American conflict, the industrialized port city of Liverpool served as an effective hub of clandestine Confederate operations in Europe. Liverpool was well suited for its new role in a variety of ways. Liverpool was one of the largest and most industrialized cities in the world, and its large port and proximity to other manufacturing centers like Manchester and Birmingham had turned it into a financial hub. The city had served as the primary port from which British slave ships had operated out of before the banning of the slave trade in 1807. Less than a year later, businessmen in Liverpool created the city’s cotton exchange and immediately began a close relationship with wealthy Southern merchants. With England extremely reliant on imported cotton, many Liverpudlian brokers and speculators owed their fortunes to the trade, and were thus willing to support the Southern war effort.
When the US Navy blockaded Southern ports in April of 1861, the flow of cotton abruptly stopped, devastating England’s well-developed textile industry almost overnight. Expatriated Southerners such as Norman Walker and Charles Prioleau who had previously established themselves among Liverpool’s merchant elite used the desperation for cotton as leverage to garner financial and material support. They did not need to look far for willing conspirators. With cotton prices soaring, the Confederates found friends not only in British cotton merchants who saw the opportunity to make large amounts of money for the high demand product, but also by entrepreneurs who saw the chance to make fortunes by sending goods to the Confederacy via blockade runners.
Led by James Bulloch, the Confederacy’s envoy to Britain, contracts were signed between Prioleau along with other influential Southern merchants and shipyards in Liverpool’s Merseyside docks. Through these contracts over 30 blockade-running vessels were built between 1861 and 1864 for the Confederacy, with another 13 being built in 1865 but not seeing service. These docks also repaired blockade runners built in other ports and converted civilian steamers, such as the Denbigh which proved to be a successful blockade runner, making a total of 13 runs before being sunk by the US Navy. These ships, unarmed and technically civilian vessels, could be built legally in Britain as they were constructed for private business and not directly for the Confederate Navy.
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The construction of warships was a much more risky operation. Britain’s maritime neutrality laws did not allow for the building of armed vessels for the Confederacy, but Liverpudlian shipbuilders and Southern
contractors quickly found a loophole. Warships could be built in Liverpool with the specifications needed to mount guns, but would be absent of both crews and armament. After being launched, they would be sailed to neutral ports, most commonly the Azores off the coast of Portugal. A second ship would follow, bringing with it cannon and other supplies needed for war which had been bought separately from British suppliers. With international maritime legislation in its infancy, it was easy to arm, crew, and commission these vessels once out of British waters and then prey on merchant shipping coming to and from US ports.
This system greatly embarrassed the British government after the CSS Alabama, a Liverpool built commerce raider, had burned and seized Union shipping from 1862 until its sinking in 1864. In response, authorities in England authorized the seizure of the CSS Alexandria, a warship being built for the Confederacy in Liverpool in 1863. A lengthy legal battle over the fate of the ship ensued, which resulted in her being renamed and secretly bought as a merchant vessel by Confederate agents and then armed somewhere in the Caribbean. The war ended before it could be put into service. As the Alexandria case drew on, the British Government also seized two modern ironclad rams being built at a Liverpool dock, integrating them into the Royal Navy after the US Navy threatened to send ships to destroy the vessels and declare war on Britain.
The loss of these vessels by the summer of 1863 and the poor outlook of the war for the Confederacy by the end of that year also signaled the loss of support from many of the Liverpool merchants. Seeing the writing on the wall, many began selling what little cotton was being brought to port by blockade runners to the United States. Popular opinion in Britain, which had always been skeptical of the Confederacy, became too great to be ignored, and wealthy Liverpudlians stopped financially backing the Confederacy. In response, Bulloch and other agents transferred their operations to France, but many of the vessels built there were commissioned too late to see active service in the war. Without foreign aid, the Confederacy’s blockade running and commerce raiding initiatives would have been complete failures. Liverpool was at the center of this network of illegal commerce and showcased the frail neutralities of European powers. Ultimately ports such as Liverpool had too many financial, material, and political limitations to alter the course of the war, but the warships it built and the blockade runners it facilitated effectively funded the Confederate states from abroad throughout its existence. Liverpool is perhaps one of the most striking examples of how the American Civil War held global ramifications and magnified what is largely viewed as a purely domestic conflict