The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy

Historian Rose (Washington’s Spies) delivers an entertaining chronicle of the battle of wits between a Confederate spy and a Union agent in England during the early years of the Civil War. In 1861, ex-Union Navy officer James Bulloch sailed for Liverpool seeking to build a clandestine Confederate navy in order to break the Union blockade of Southern ports. His nemesis was U.S. consul Thomas Dudley, whose “Quaker rectitude, stiff-necked temperance, and remorseless work ethic” provided a jarring contrast to Bulloch’s “designedly aristocratic style.” Tracing Britain’s 1861 Proclamation of Neutrality to the British view that the Civil War “was yet another of their rancorous colonial cousins’ periodic fits of madness,” Rose documents how Bulloch—aided by a well-placed mole in Britain’s Foreign Office—exploited a loophole in the British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 to convince Liverpool’s shipbuilders to manufacture the commerce raiders CSS Florida and CSS Alabama. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation helped turn the tide in Dudley’s favor, however, as Britons came to view the war as “a humanitarian crusade to free the oppressed,” rather than a fight to preserve the Union. Rose’s indelible character sketches and firm grasp of the industrial and political milieu of 19th-century Britain enrich the contest of wills between Bulloch and Dudley. This spy-versus-spy tale delights. (Dec.)