by Rebecca North, MA Modern History, LJMU

In our first blogpost on research conducted during the MA course on Liverpool and Slavery at LJMU, current student Rebecca North discusses her findings on Liverpool women who helped to continue slavery by fundraising for the Confederacy at St George’s Hall.

Male figures are ever-present throughout historical research into slavery, but the role that women have played in upholding racist systems has long been overlooked.  Whilst female abolitionists have long attracted scholarly attention, women who held a pro-slavery stance have remained ‘virtually invisible’.[i]  Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers argues this gap was due to many historians believing that attitudes of women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed significantly from men and these behaviours, such as abusing enslaved people, did not conform to prevailing ideas about white women and, therefore, were dismissed.[ii] As a result, women’s contributions have been overlooked, or entirely written out of history.  Recent scholarship, however, has slowly developed to focus on rectifying this ‘lacuna in the literature on women’.[iii]

One recent development in scholarship has notably included more of a focus on enterprise, and although they were less likely than men to own whole plantations, there were a considerable number of female enslavers (‘slave owners’).  Hannah Young claims many of these were even ‘living at the heart of British society’.[iv]  My research into The Great Southern Bazaar, as part of LJMU’s MA in Modern History, provides an exploration of Liverpool women in leadership roles within the public sphere during the nineteenth century, and further provides an exploration of the social and cultural chains that bound Britain and America during the war that meant that women became complicit in perpetuating slavery.

By the eve of the American Civil War, Liverpool imported 90 per cent of Britain’s cotton.[v]  At the outbreak of the Civil War, Liverpool showed alliance through the press and by public gatherings, however, the alliance was most prominent through the Liverpool Southern Club formed in 1862.  The club drew its membership from among leading Southerners living in Liverpool, meaning those that were involved in the organisation were often involved in the Southern trade, such as James Dunwoody Bulloch and Charles K Prioleau, manager of Fraser, Trenholm and Company, The Liverpool merchant firm who were responsible for creating networks between the Confederacy and Britain. [vi]

The Great Southern Bazaar

In the summer of 1864, the tide turned strongly against the South in the war, and a Union victory became increasingly definite, but the Southern Independence Association in Liverpool continued with its plans for a bazaar to be held at St George’s Hall.[vii] The Times published an advertisement promoting the upcoming event, in which it claimed the bazaar was in aid of the ‘suffering of the Southern prisoners of war’ and their sickness wounds, as well as the widows and orphans who are left behind as a result of the conflict with the North.[viii] Like many of the other Confederate inspired actions within Liverpool, the driving force behind the bazaar was James Spence. However, as written in The Times, many Liverpool women confirmed their ‘active aid’ in the bazaar to help with raising money as well as raising further awareness for the Confederacy, in what was, as Richard Blackett argues, ‘the most pro-Confederate city’ in Britain.[ix]

On the 18th of October 1864, the four-day bazaar opened its doors for the first time. Although the weather was gloomy, The Index proclaims that ‘one bright, cheerful, pleasant place in Liverpool upon which the elements exert no depressing influence’ was the interior of St George’s Hall.[x] The bazaar’s high admission charges made the event a formal occasion that notably appealed to the upper classes.[xi] This grandness was further reflected in the décor, as tricoloured drapery that reflected the Confederacy’s ‘ingeniously designed combinations of colour’ fell across the roofs of each stall, giving the hall a ‘soft and rich appearance’.[xii] Displayed around the room were also portraits of Confederate generals and flags representing both the Confederacy and Britain.

Upon entering the hall, it was divided up into stalls, one stall for every Confederate State. At each stall, the ladies sold fancy goods of their choice and were attired in elegant clothes with silk scarfs, on ‘which was inscribed in gilt letters the name of the Southern state within which the wearer’s jurisdiction lay’.[xiii]  North Carolina was presided over by ‘Mrs Spence’ and was opulently overloaded with china vases and luxurious clocks and Georgia’s stall was run by ‘Mrs Bulloch’ which sold baby linen. ‘Mrs Prioleau’ and ‘Lady Wharncliffe’ oversaw South Carolina’s stall that contained small but ‘richly wrought articles of needlework’, whilst stalls such as Kentucky’s even sold articles made by Confederate prisoners of war.[xiv] This displays the vast, numerous amount of goods for sale and the interest this will have attracted from the public. It also indicates the pivotal role women played within the organisation and operation of the bazaar as meticulous planning will have gone into the selection of goods chosen to sell, and specifically into choosing luxurious ones in order to raise a significant amount of money for the cause.  

Along with the women’s individual contributions, The New York Times reports how contributions were sent in from all over the world in aid of the bazaar.[xv]  In addition to the stalls, both The Index and The New York Times stated that the most noteworthy and striking feature of the bazaar was the raffle in which all sorts of articles were up for winning, including the prize of a Shetland pony.[xvi] With the daily live music concerts, games and notable raffle prizes, this collectively reinforced a southern country fair atmosphere and enticed thousands of visitors during the four days.

Across the duration of the event mass crowds attended and the bazaar was declared an overall success. This success is reflected in The New York Times, which reported the overall return of each day.  The total of sales from the first day was £3170, the second, £2271, the third, £2451, and the fourth saw earnings of £2151.  This meant that along with the private subscriptions that the Liverpool Southern Club had been raising for months prior to the bazaar, a grand total of £19,050 was raised for the Confederate prisoners, a significant amount of money in nineteenth-century terms.[xvii] The bazaar’s success was also apparent through the immense crowds that congregated in the hall each day, with one day seeing a total of 1,700 visitors and on the final day the crowds were so great that ‘it was thought advisable to refuse further applicants for entrance’.[xviii] The four-day event was a considerable triumph.  The Index commented that visitors who entered were faced with the ‘difficult task of saying no to a pretty woman’.[xix]  Newspaper articles from both The Index (a Confederate propaganda paper) and The New York Times display how the bazaar’s success was reported worldwide and received national attention. A notable section in The New York Times is the recognition of the women’s role in the bazaar as promoters and sympathisers, who ‘entered heart and soul’ into the work with ‘zeal and discretion’.[xx]

Who were the women?

It is difficult to know for sure what motivated these women to support and raise money for the South, which effectively aided the continuation of slavery and the prolonged the US Civil War.  Motivations may have been economic, or they may have been because of deep social and familial ties to the southern states amongst the Liverpool elite.  Either way, there was a callous disregard for those enslaved in the southern states, whom the Confederacy sought to keep in slavery. 

It was common for women to organise charity bazaars during the nineteenth century, however, the women involved in the Great Southern Bazaar were all married to members of the Southern Independence Association.  These women included Mrs Bulloch – wife of Confederate agent James Dunwoody Bulloch who supplied ships to the Confederacy and who later became involved in Liverpool Nautical School (later absorbed into LJMU).[xxi]

This is also the case for Mrs Spence, the wife of James Spence, and Lady Wharncliffe, the wife of British aristocrat Lord Wharncliffe.  This was significant, as historian Richard Blackett has argued that evidence suggests that the vast majority of support for the Confederacy did, in fact, come almost exclusively from the aristocracy, meaning Wharncliffe’s involvement was a ‘reaffirmation of a neutral alliance between British aristocracy and Southern chivalry’.[xxii]

However, the lady who was deemed the most involved within the organisation of the bazaar was Mary Prioleau, wife of Charles K. Prioleau.  The couple lived at 19 Abercromby Square, now part of the University of Liverpool.  Her involvement is prominent throughout the letters to her husband, which detail the meticulous planning of contributions and the organisation of the other ladies involved.  Mary Prioleau (Liverpool-born), however, seemed less than excited with the organisation of the event.  She wrote in one letter ‘I do wish the bazaar was over I am sure it is going to be worse than troublesome in some ways’.[xxiii]  Additionally, Mary also proclaims in an earlier letter when the bazaar was cancelled for a brief moment that it ‘makes no difference to us’, which emphasises that the wellbeing of Southern prisoners would not disturb the Prioleau’s everyday lives – just as with the lives of the enslaved.[xxiv]  The social and cultural links to the Confederacy were so strong with the women of Liverpool that despite these women having no interest or desire to partake in the event, they still felt obliged to offer their assistance. 

These women display how evidently all those involved in the bazaar had ties to the South in one way or another, and that significantly they were all part of the same upper-class social circle in Liverpool.  During this era, women in all aspects of society played a notable role in the public sphere and through the study of a single event, The Great Southern Bazaar, it becomes apparent that women played much more of a complicit role in the Atlantic slave economy than was presumed.  This one event demonstrates the embeddedness of Confederate support in Liverpool, and that the multifarious ways that women upheld, and perhaps continue to uphold, racist systems has not yet been fully probed.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

‘Bazaar in Aid of the Southern Prisoners Relief Fund’, The Times, August 19, 1864, p.3

 ‘National anti-slavery bazaar’, Gazette. Vol. I. No. II, 1846, Library of Congress.

‘Southern Bazaar in Liverpool: Raising funds for the rebels’, The New York Times, November 13, 1864, p.3

‘The Liverpool Bazaar, from our special correspondent’, The Index, October 20, 1864, p.668

‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864, p.2

Birkett, Mary. A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to her own sex. (Dublin Privately published, 1792) Estlin, John Bishop. A Brief Notice of American Slavery and the Abolition Movement, (H.C.Evans,1846)

Transcripts of Mary Prioleau’s Letters to husband Charles, 1863-1865, Fraser, Trenholm and Company papers, Maritime Archive.

Secondary sources

Books

Anderson, Bonnie S. Joyous Greetings the First International Women's Movement, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (Penguin, 2015)

Blackett, R. J. M., Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2001)

Dicky, Sam. Liverpool and Slavery : an Historical Account of the Liverpool-African Slave Trade (Scouse Press, 1985)

Ellison, Mary. Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil war (University of Chicago Press, 1972)

Hussey, John. Cruisers, Cotton and Confederates: Liverpool Waterfront in the Days of the Confederacy (Countyvise Limited, 2008)

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property : White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale university press. 2019.)

Midgley, Clare. Woman against slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)

Oldfield, J.R. Popular politics and British anti- slavery: the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787-1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1998)

Richardson, Sarah. The Political Worlds of Women : Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain ( London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2015)

Sebrell, Thomas E. Persuading John Bull : Union and Confederate Propaganda in Britain, 1860-65 (London: Lexington Books, 2014)

Tibbles, Anthony. Liverpool and the slave trade (Liverpool University Press, 2018)

Wilson, Walter E. The Bulloch Belles: Three First Ladies, a Spy, a President’s Mother and Other Women of a 19th Century Georgia Family ( McFarland & Company, 2015)

Young, Hannah. “Forgotten Women: Anna Eliza Elletson and Absentee Slave Ownership.” In Britain's History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a 'National Sin', edited by Katie Donington et al., Liverpool University Press, 2016, pp. 83–101.

Journal articles

Haggerty, Sheryllynne. ‘“Miss Fan can tun her han!” Female traders in eighteenth-century British-American Atlantic port cities’, Atlantic Studies, 6:1, (2009), pp.29-42

Hall, N. “The Liverpool Cotton Market and the American Civil War”, Northern History, 34:1, (1998), pp.149-169

Holcomb, Julie L. “Blood-Stained Sugar: Gender, Commerce and the British Slave-Trade Debates.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 35, no. 4, 2014, pp. 611–628.

Jacobs, Editha. “The Role of Women in the British Anti-Slavery Campaigns”, The Journal of Caribbean History, 40, 2 (2006), pp.293-307

Midgley, Clare “Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti‐slavery culture, Slavery & Abolition”, Slavery & Abolition, 17:3, (1996), pp.137-162

Prochaska, F. K. “Charity Bazaars In Nineteenth-Century England.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, (Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp.62-84

Sussman, Charlotte. "Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792." Representations, no. 48 (1994), pp.48-69

Websites

‘Bazaar definition’. Online. Available. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/bazaar

‘The 1864 Southern Bazaar in Liverpool’. Online. Available. https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square.

‘The New York Times’. Online. Available.  https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-New-York-Times

Endnotes

[i] Hannah Young, “Forgotten Women: Anna Eliza Elletson and Absentee Slave Ownership.” In Britain's History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a 'National Sin', edited by Katie Donington et al., Liverpool University Press, 2016, p.86

[ii] Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property : White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale university press. 2019.) pp.XI, XII

[iii] Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain ( London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2015), pp.18, 21

[iv] Young, “Forgotten Women, pp.83,86

[v] Tibbles, Liverpool and the slave trade, p.71; N. Hall “The Liverpool Cotton Market and the American Civil War”, Northern History, 34:1 (1998), p.150

[vi] Richard J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2001), p.63; Tibbles, Liverpool and the slave trade, p.102

[vii] Thomas E. Sebrell, Persuading John Bull : Union and Confederate Propaganda in Britain, 1860-65 (London: Lexington Books, 2014), p.188

[viii] ‘Bazaar in Aid of the Southern Prisoners Relief Fund’, The Times, August 19, 1864, p.3

[ix] ‘Bazaar in Aid of the Southern Prisoners Relief Fund’, The Times, August 19, 1864, p.3; Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War, p.64

[x] Walter E. Wilson interestingly refers to the bazaar as being a five-day event, however, both New York Times extracts and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative claim the bazaar to have run for four days, therefore, within this research it will state that the event operated for four days. Walter E. Wilson, The Bulloch Belles: Three First Ladies, a Spy, a President’s Mother and Other Women of a 19th Century Georgia Family ( McFarland & Company, 2015), p.141; ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864, p.2; ‘Southern Bazaar in Liverpool: Raising funds for the rebels’, The New York Times, November 13, 1864, p.3; ‘The 1864 Southern Bazaar in Liverpool’. https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square. Accessed 13.12.2020 10:30; ‘The Liverpool Bazaar, from our special correspondent’, The Index, October 20, 1864, p.668

[xi] Sebrell, Persuading John Bull, p.189

[xii] The purpose of displaying both flags will have been for patriotism but also to insinuate the strong alliance between the two countries and how they co-exist together. ‘Southern Bazaar in Liverpool: Raising funds for the rebels’, The New York Times, November 13, 1864, p.3

[xiii] ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864,p.2

[xiv] ‘Southern Bazaar in Liverpool: Raising funds for the rebels’, The New York Times, November 13, 1864,p.3

[xv] ‘Southern Bazaar in Liverpool: Raising funds for the rebels’, The New York Times, November 13, 1864, p.3

[xvi] ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, New York Times, November 3, 1864, p.2 ; ‘The Liverpool Bazaar, from our special correspondent’, The Index, October 20, 1864, p.668

[xvii] ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864,p.2

[xviii] ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864,p.2

[xix] ‘The Liverpool Bazaar, from our special correspondent’, The Index, October 20, 1864, p.668

[xx] ‘The Southern Bazaar for wounded Confederate prisoners’, The New York Times, November 3, 1864,p.2

[xxi] Wilson, The Bulloch Belles, p.141

[xxii] Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War, pp.184, 185

[xxiii] B/FT/1/88, Letter from the Prioleau’s residence at Balkail, Carlisle (envelope addressed to Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool), 26 Aug 1864.

[xxiv] B/FT/1/86, Photocopy of letter from the Prioleau’s residence at Balkail, Carlisle (envelope addressed to C.K.Prioleau Esq., 4 Derwent Square, Stoneycroft, West Derby), 3 Aug 1864.