British businesses and need for cotton
helped Confederacy fight Civil War

Thanks to Great Britain, the South was able to prevail during the Civil War.

The reason was cotton.

In the early 1860s, the Lancashire cotton industry, which dominated the mid-19th century British economy, was devastated by the Civil War. In April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of the Confederate southern ports, the outlet for the raw cotton on which Lancashire’s mills depended. Attempts to find alternative sources of supply from India or Egypt had little success. Deprived of essential raw material, spinning mills and weaving sheds closed down or resorted to short-time working. Unemployment mounted rapidly. By November 1862, three-fifths of the English labor force, 331,000 men and women, was idle. It was a period known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine. But British businesses, particularly those in Liverpool, came to the rescue.

The Federal blockade of southern ports was seen as an unwarranted interference with the freedom of trade. There was pressure on the British government to demand its lifting, by force if necessary. It was the industry and profit-seeking of Liverpool merchants that generated money for a cash-strapped South.

The links between Liverpool and the southern states stretched back to the early 19th century boom in cotton consumption and manufacture. Cotton was the South’s main export, and it was through the port of Liverpool that it made its way to the mills of Manchester.

Along with cash, the Confederacy needed warships – and Liverpool, with its bustling port, was happy to comply. Laird Brothers and the engineers Fawcett, Preston & Company were firms approached to build the most notorious vessel of the war, the CSS Alabama. The warship preyed on Union commercial vessels and undermined the North’s supply system, in addition to distracting the U.S. Navy from its essential duty of blockading southern ports.

The Alabama terrorized the Union navy from its launch in 1862 to its sinking in the summer of 1864. Northern politicians were outraged by the construction of a Confederate vessel in a British port, not at least because in 1862 the British government had issued a declaration of neutrality.

Technically, it was illegal for British subjects to arm warships for either the North or the South, yet little official scrutiny was afforded to the building of the Alabama. To avoid detection, a Confederate agent arranged for the Alabama to leave its port under a false name and to be armed offshore. This act of subterfuge would have been impossible without the help of the British shipbuilders, and possibly even the dock officials.

The launching of the Alabama was incredibly embarrassing for the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, and from 1863 onward the government took firm actions to stop this sort of thing. Several vessels under construction by English shipbuilders were seized over the next few years, but it was too little, too late. The Alabama went on to sink an estimated 62 ships throughout the war, and after 1865, a furious U.S. government brought a series of legal actions against Britain known as the Alabama Claims.

Liverpool’s intimate links with the Confederacy is an example of just how international the American Civil War really was. The merchants, shipbuilders and engineers of Liverpool seem to have been untroubled by the moral questions raised by aiding the South. The British government was committed to a strict policy of neutrality, but as the case of the Alabama shows, that position was easily undermined by individual desire for profit.