with a family (unless he secludes himself from society and forgoes all the social advantages of a residence in England). A man might be comfortable with this in a New England village, but not, I assure you, as the representative of America in the greatest commercial city in England". In 1855 this was done. Congress passed a law fixing the salary of the consul at Liverpool at $7,500 per year. Hawthorne described in his journal the American seamen with whom he dealt as "most rascally set of sailors that ever were seen - dirty, desperate, and altogether pirate-like in aspect". It appears that he often found his consular duties to be a burden: "the duties of the office carried me to prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner's inquests, death-beds, funerals, and brought me in contact with insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild adventurers, diplomatists, brother-consuls, and all manner of simpletons and unfortunates, in greater number and variety than I had ever dreamed of as pertaining to America, in addition to whom there was an equivalent multitude of English rogues, dexterously counterfeiting the genuine yankee article." Hawthorne was retired from the position in 1857, having apparently discharged his duties in a "prudent and efficient manner" American Civil War During the American Civil War (1861–65), consul Thomas Haines Dudley made strenuous efforts to prevent ships from Liverpool from breaking the United States Navy blockade of Confederate ports. Great Britain remained officially neutral throughout the war but there were many Confederate sympathisers in Liverpool. The commerce raider CSS Alabama was a screw sloop-of-war built for the Confederate States Navy at Birkenhead in Merseyside in 1862 by John Laird Sons and Company.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=xqGdTLaIksYC&pg=PA72&dq=united+states+consul+liverpool&hl=en&ei=YDVDTIvXN4Pl4gbskNy_Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&q=united%20states%20consul%20liverpool&f=false Beaman, Charles C., p.72, The National and Private Alabama Claims"] Retrieved July 18, 2010</ref> She was eventually sunk by the in 1864.Annual Reports of the Navy Department: Report of the Secretary of the Navy. Retrieved July 16, 2010 In 1865, following the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, vice consul Wilding notified his masters in Washington that John Surratt, one of Booth's conspirators, had taken refuge in Liverpool. Surratt had fled to Europe with the help of Confederate agents, booking passage under an alias and landing at Liverpool in September 1865, where he went into hiding in the oratory of the Church of the Holy Cross. Curiously, the United States Government chose not to pursue Surratt any further,