Author’s note
Historians agree that events in Liverpool and Birkenhead in 1863 could have radically redirected the course of the American Civil War. Unstinting efforts were made by the slaveholding Confederacy to acquire Mersey-built ironclad warships sufficiently powerful to break the Union navy’s suffocating blockade of southern ports. Equally determined steps were taken by the North to stop this happening. If the blockade had been lifted, the South could have exported cotton to British textile mills, financing the shipment of vital war materials to supply its forces. Had the South achieved this aim, it might have won the American civil war.
In an age when ‘Liverpool went Dixie’, supporters of the Confederacy staged a successful bazaar in the city’s St George’s Hall in October, 1864
