CIVIL WAR AND THE CONFEDERACY

The Business Records of Fraser, Trenholm & Company of Liverpool and Charleston, South Carolina, 1860-1877, from the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool

During the Civil War, Fraser, Trenholm and Company was a prominent commercial house in Liverpool with close ties to the Confederate States. George A Trenholm, the senior partner of the Charleston office, became Secretary to the Confederate States Treasury in 1864. Charles Kuhn Prioleau, the senior partner of the Liverpool office, had been brought up in South Carolina and most of his family still lived there.

Their archive provides a unique insight into:

• The financing of the Confederate cause and the trade of guns for cotton;
• Blockade running;
• The war in the South - including an eye-witness account of the shelling of Charleston;
• The construction of Confederate vessels in Liverpool;
• Sympathies for the Confederate cause in Northern England;
• The fate of remaining Confederate funds after the Civil War.