Were French Prisoners Sold as Slaves in Liverpool?

Liverpool’s forgotten French population

During the eighteenth-century wars between Britain and France, Liverpool became an important centre of privateering. Privateers were privately owned armed vessels licensed by the government to attack enemy shipping during wartime.

Capture an enemy vessel and, once a prize court declared the seizure lawful, its owners could profit from the ship and cargo. But the captured ship also brought a crew, and those sailors became prisoners of war.

Liverpool therefore developed into an important prisoner depot. French captives were held in the old Borough Gaol, in the Tower near the bottom of Water Street and, during the wars of the 1790s, in the new Borough Gaol on Great Howard Street. Historic England’s research record confirms that the new gaol was appropriated for French prisoners of war before it began taking Liverpool’s ordinary prisoners. [1]

Francis Abell’s history of prisoners of war describes captives continually arriving as Liverpool privateers returned with their prizes. The French prisoners were not an invisible population: guards moved them through the streets, their handmade goods were sold at the prison entrance and their funerals passed through the town. [2]

What was actually sold?

This is probably the first ingredient from which the slavery story developed.

A Liverpool privateer did not simply arrive with prisoners. It arrived with a prize. Once the courts had condemned a captured vessel as lawful enemy property, the ship and cargo could be sold for profit. Liverpool newspapers advertised captured vessels and commodities including wine, coffee, indigo, textiles and provisions.

The distinction is crucial: the ship and its cargo were captured property; the crew were prisoners of war.

Over generations, however, the statement “French prizes were brought into Liverpool and sold” could easily become “French prisoners were brought into Liverpool and sold”. One changed word transforms the meaning.

But weren’t prisoners given a price?

Yes—and this may be the most important source of the rumour.

Britain and France operated systems for exchanging or ransoming prisoners. An agreement made in 1780 set equivalents according to rank. An ordinary sailor or soldier could carry a ransom equivalent of £1, while senior officers represented higher sums or larger numbers of ordinary prisoners. [3]

Read two centuries later, a document apparently valuing a French sailor at £1 can resemble a sale price. It was not. The amount belonged to a government-regulated ransom and exchange mechanism.

A captured French sailor remained a French subject and a prisoner of war. The sum did not transfer ownership of him to another person. His captivity was expected to end through exchange, release, peace or repatriation. That status was fundamentally different from Atlantic chattel slavery, under which enslaved Africans and their descendants were treated as property that could be bought, inherited and compelled to labour.

The prisoners who sold things

There is another ironic twist: things connected with Liverpool’s French prisoners certainly were being sold—but the prisoners were often doing the selling.

French POWs across Britain became known for producing intricate objects from bone, straw, wood and other available materials. Liverpool prisoners made snuff boxes, rings, crucifixes, card boxes, toys, cabinets and model ships.

Richard Brooke remembered these goods being displayed at the entrance to the gaol and sold for the prisoners’ benefit. Abell also records one Liverpool prisoner leaving captivity with 300 guineas earned from his manufacturing work. Prisoners even staged theatrical performances for paying audiences.

These were not free men, but the evidence describes prisoners selling their handiwork—not Liverpool merchants selling the prisoners.

Captivity could still be brutal

Correcting the slavery claim should not romanticise what happened to these men. Conditions could be grim, and contemporary accounts disagree about the adequacy of food, clothing, sanitation and medical care.

A highly critical letter published in 1798 accused the Great Howard Street prison authorities of allowing captives to starve. Liverpool’s mayor and magistrates inspected the prison and disputed much of the accusation. The competing accounts must therefore be treated cautiously.

There is little doubt, however, that prisoners died in Liverpool. Brooke remembered the hearse carrying Frenchmen from the gaol to the burial ground of St John’s Church. That churchyard later became St John’s Gardens, where a memorial records French prisoners who died in Liverpool between 1772 and 1803.

And then Liverpool built the Nelson Monument

The Nelson Monument was unveiled in 1813, only a few years after Liverpool’s Georgian prisons had held large numbers of French captives. It now stands in Exchange Flags behind the Town Hall.

Historic England describes four chained prisoners around its base. The figures represent captives or vanquished enemies associated with Nelson’s four celebrated victories: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. [4]

National Museums Liverpool similarly identifies them as captured sailors represented in torment. [5]

They were not intended simply as a record of enslaved Africans. But viewers connected them with slavery almost immediately.

Liverpool was arguing about this in 1813

Only weeks after the monument was unveiled, a letter in the Liverpool Mercury referred to complaints that the chained figures resembled an “exhibition of slavery”. The writer insisted they were prisoners of war.

That reaction matters because it shows the association is not a modern misunderstanding. Liverpool people were already debating the visual connection between chains, prisoners and slavery in 1813.

Herman Melville later described the monument in his 1849 novel Redburn. Although the figures represented enemies defeated by Nelson, their bodies and chains led him to compare them with enslaved people.

The Nelson Monument does not prove that French prisoners were sold into slavery. It does, however, help explain why the idea became so powerful.

A rumour built from several true stories

Nearly every ingredient behind the legend is historically genuine:

• Liverpool was deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
• Liverpool privateers captured French ships.
• French prisoners were brought into the town.
• Captured ships and cargoes were sold.
• Prisoners were assigned ransom and exchange values.
• French prisoners made objects which were sold.
• Some captives died and were buried here.
• Liverpool erected a monument showing defeated prisoners in chains.

Put those facts together and pass the story through generations, and it is easy to see how “captured French ships were sold” could become “captured Frenchmen were sold”.

Were French prisoners sold into slavery in Liverpool?

The most responsible answer is: we have found no evidence that they were.

That is not the same as pretending historians can prove that no isolated incident ever occurred. But the claim usually made is much larger: that selling French prisoners formed part of Liverpool’s privateering system.

Such a system should leave a substantial documentary trail—sales notices, ownership transfers, court disputes, correspondence or French diplomatic complaints. Instead, the records repeatedly describe capture, registration, imprisonment, parole, ransom, exchange, escape, death and release.

When the Peace of Amiens arrived in 1802, more than 1,100 prisoners were released from Liverpool. That is entirely consistent with their status as prisoners of war and extremely difficult to reconcile with the claim that they had been sold away as slaves.

Liverpool does not need an unsupported legend to demonstrate its role in slavery. That involvement is enormous, well documented and uncomfortable enough. Nor should correcting the story diminish the suffering of the French prisoners, some of whom spent years behind bars and never returned home.

They were captives. Their ships could be sold. Their cargoes could be sold. Their handiwork could be sold. But the available evidence does not support the claim that the prisoners themselves were sold into slavery.