A Confederate spy plots to build the South’s navy with England’s help

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Union had 42 commissioned ships in its Navy while the Confederacy had a mere one. What’s more, the North, unlike the South, had the industrial capacity to increase its stock. In “The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy,” Alexander Rose tells the improbable story of James Bulloch, a Confederate sympathizer dispatched to England to secretly build a fleet of ships, and Thomas Dudley, the U.S. consul in Liverpool who was determined to stop him. 

Rose’s extensive research has yielded an exhilarating account told with style and verve. It begins with U.S. Navy veteran Bulloch, an accomplished sailor from a family of slaveholders, meeting with Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory early in the war to concoct a complex plan. President Abraham Lincoln had already imposed a naval blockade of the South intended to prevent the Confederacy from importing needed supplies and to devastate its economy by halting its lucrative export of cotton.

The scheme Mallory and Bulloch devised had three components. The first involved building a fleet of fast blockade runners that could get past the Union ships and smuggle necessary weapons into the South. The second involved building cruisers to harass and sink Union merchant ships, with the expectation that the U.S. Navy would have to divert some of its warships for their protection, thus creating holes in the blockade. The final stage involved building advanced warships to attack the U.S. Navy directly.

Bulloch, described by Rose as possessing an “effortless superiority, relaxed charm, and worldly detachment,” was well suited for his clandestine mission. His adversary, Dudley, was quite different, known for “his Quaker rectitude, stiff-necked temperance, and remorseless work ethic.” The book’s most well-drawn character, however, is Liverpool itself, where much of the action takes place. It was, in the author’s words, “the most violent, vice-ridden, crime-soaked locale in Europe.” Rose memorably describes the port city as “a low-lying place inhabited by low, lying people.”

England was officially neutral in America’s Civil War, but Confederate flags were flown throughout Liverpool. Many British citizens saw the Confederates not as rebels fighting for slavery but as freedom fighters battling government oppression. Liverpool in particular had strong ties to the American South. Most of England’s slave ships had been built there, and when the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, Rose writes, many former slavers “pivoted to cotton, effectively doing business with the same Southerners as before, just trading white gold rather than the humans harvesting it.”  

Bulloch, then, had little trouble enlisting co-conspirators; those without political motivation for aiding the Confederacy were open to being bribed. While Dudley and other Union officials were immediately aware of Bulloch and suspicious of his aims, the Confederate agent, who had well-placed spies working on his behalf inside the British government, always seemed to be one step ahead of his pursuers.

In addition to evading Dudley, Bulloch had to find a way around Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, which prohibited British subjects from participating in foreign wars. He cannily exploited a loophole in the law, constructing ships in Liverpool but waiting to load them with weapons and inform the unwitting crew of their real purpose until they were safely out of England. While Dudley was on to Bulloch’s tactics – “there is no doubt but that she is intended for the Rebels,” he wrote of one of Bulloch’s ships to Secretary of State William Seward – he faced the formidable challenge of producing enough evidence to compel the British government to seize the ships.

Bulloch’s most notable successes were the Oreto and the Enrica, ships the builders falsely claimed had been purchased by the Italian government. Once in international waters, Confederate flags were raised as they were rechristened the CSS Florida and the CSS Alabama, respectively. The crew, who had signed on as merchant seamen, were exhorted to join the fight for the Confederacy instead (and assured they’d be paid handsomely for their participation).

The ships were successful – in one two-week period, the Alabama destroyed 10 American whalers and mail and cargo ships. President Lincoln, however, resisted pressure to divert the Navy from the blockade. In the end, Rose notes, compared to the success of the naval blockade, the attacks on Union merchant ships amounted to little more than a nuisance. Moreover, British public opinion turned in favor of the North after the Emancipation Proclamation made clear that the war was not simply about the preservation of the Union but about ending slavery. The shift made Bulloch’s job all the more difficult.

“The Lion and the Fox” tells a fascinating tale, but it remains unclear whether Bulloch’s actions ever posed a real threat to the Union. He certainly had big ambitions; in fact, he seems downright delusional as he imagines his warships attacking the port cities of the North, demolishing their navy yards, and demanding large payments in gold and cash to fill the Confederate coffers.

What the author calls Bulloch’s “mad fantasies” make the coda even more tantalizing. Bulloch remained in Liverpool after the war; he didn’t have to worry about being prosecuted for treason in the wake of President Andrew Johnson’s full pardon for Confederates, but he feared being sued for financial compensation as a result of all those downed merchant ships. The Confederate spy’s half-sister, Mittie Bulloch, was the mother of Theodore Roosevelt, and Teddy was apparently quite fond of his “Uncle Jimmie,” who regaled him with his war stories on a rare visit to America in 1877. In his first book, “The Naval War of 1812,” which established the future president’s reputation, Roosevelt acknowledged “Captain James D. Bulloch, formerly of the United States Navy ... without whose advice and sympathy this work would probably never have been written or even begun.” His uncle’s devoted work on behalf of a different Navy remained unmentioned.