PRESS RELEASE, MARCH 2024
‘How the West was Won: Liverpool, The American Civil War and the Lincoln Assassination’
Water Street is a novel based upon true events in mid-19th Century Liverpool. These events include:
- The building of a Confederate Navy – considered an act of War by Lincoln’s cabinet. There was a proposal to send a gunboat up the Mersey to destroy Cammell Laird. We came within a hair’s breadth of a World War in 1863.
- The project to kidnap Lincoln (later assassinate) was financed in Liverpool.
- A Cold War-style spy yarn played out in the streets, docks and shipyards of the city, with American agents on both sides.
- John Surratt, the only Lincoln assassination conspirator to escape the US arrived in Liverpool and was given sanctuary by the Catholic church.
- Confederate President Jefferson Davis lived in Liverpool after the war.
THE GREAT CYCLE OF HISTORY
Water Street and the forthcoming follow-up The Agency regard Britain’s flagrant bias and support of the Confederacy before, during and even after the US Civil War. Both books map to divisions still present in American political life and society, with the forthcoming Presidential election offering further constitution-bending repercussions.
In 1863, Liverpool was a rich metropolis at loggerheads with the United States Government over the illegal financing and construction of Confederate Navy vessels at Cammell Laird and the groundswell of support for the South in the chambers of banking and the Cotton Exchange. Union and Confederate spies stalked each other across town, vying for favour and influence of rich and powerful denizens. Four thousand miles from the theatre of conflict, it may seem bizarre but the city had a crucial influence on the fate of America and the shape of modernity.
Rapid, unchecked growth and the removal and flouting of legal restrictions to making a vast, quick fortune are familiar notions in an era of oligarchs, Brexit and petro-dollars. Water Street delves into a world that is uncomfortably familiar. You would never think that it happened in Liverpool.
THE MAXWELL CONNECTION
Using family and public archive images and accounts, psychogeographic reporting and 3D modelling, Maxwell has recreated mid-19th century Liverpool across media in order to research, reimagine and market his book Water Street and the upcoming sequel The Agency.
This book and sequel open up a fictional account of an overlooked chapter in history which has waned in the collective consciousness, concurrent with the decline of wealth and influence of the city. As EL Doctorow said, ‘The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.’
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JP Maxwell 