The New York Times recently reviewed the new book on the maneuvers of a Union diplomat and a Confederate spy over the construction of Confederate warships in England. Writer Ben Macintyre wrote the favorable review of THE LION AND THE FOX: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy by Alexander Rose. Below are some excerpts from the review:
On a Sunday morning in August 1862, a commercial sloop called the Enrica steamed out of port in the Azores in the middle of the North Atlantic. Once safely in international waters, its captain, Raphael Semmes, raised the flag of the Confederate States, fired a cannon and transformed his vessel into a warship renamed the C.S.S. Alabama, while a ragtag band played “Dixie.”
The mostly British crew had signed on as merchant seamen and were surprised to discover they were now fighting for the Southern states — or, as Semmes put it, “the oppressed against the oppressor.” However, they were persuaded by the promise of “lots of prize money” to join the Civil War at sea. Over the next two years, the Alabama proved a lethal weapon, conducting raids from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico, capturing or burning Union merchant ships.
The vessel had been built secretly (and illegally) in the dockyards at Birkenhead on the Mersey River opposite Liverpool, the high-water mark of a Confederate plot to build and equip a navy with the help of British sympathizers and profits from smuggled cotton.
The South had begun the war at a huge naval disadvantage: At the start of 1861, the U.S. Navy had 42 commissioned ships, the Confederacy just one. Lincoln’s naval blockade threatened to strangle the economy of the South. The Confederacy needed fast, heavily armed ships of its own, with which to harass Union shipping: If the Union could be forced to divert gunboats to defend merchantmen, that might open up holes in the blockade, restore commerce in the South and turn the tide of war.
The only place such a fleet could be built quickly was Liverpool, the world’s most productive shipbuilding port. But Britain was technically neutral, and under the terms of the country’s Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 (an obscure piece of legislation intended to prevent mercenaries from fighting abroad) it was illegal to build a warship on British territory for use in a conflict against any power friendly to Britain.
The complex Confederate conspiracy to fabricate a navy in secret, and the equally energetic Union efforts to stymie it, form the backdrop for Alexander Rose’s entertaining and deeply researched account of the espionage battle that took place among the Liverpool docks, with a rich cast of spies, crooks, bent businessmen and drunken sailors.
Thomas Dudley, a Quaker lawyer dispatched as America’s consul to Liverpool, is the lion of the title, although with his droopy mien and dogged manner he more closely resembled a bloodhound. Dudley’s tricky task was to deploy a small army of agents and informers through the dockyards to find out what the Confederates were up to, then try to persuade the reluctant British authorities to intervene.
His opponent was the foxy Capt. James Bulloch, a sailor from Georgia with a handsome set of mutton chop whiskers and a natural aptitude for skulduggery. The Confederacy’s chief agent in Britain, Bulloch operated blockade runners, sent armaments to the South and organized the building of the Confederate commerce raiders, all of which he financed by buying and selling cotton, Dixie’s “white gold.”
Early in the war, Bulloch realized that while the Enlistment Act banned the building of ships to fight in the Civil War, it said nothing about the possibility of constructing a civilian vessel that could later be converted to military use. It was, Rose writes, “a loophole you could sail a fleet through.”
This was how the Enrica/Alabama came to be: Disguised as a Spanish-owned trading vessel, it was secretly equipped with reinforced decks for cannon and hidden ammunition magazines. By the time Semmes took command, it had been converted into a naval warship, with pivot cannons and enough armaments to take on any Union ship.
Captain Semmes is one of the more vivid and unpleasant characters in the tale, an arrogant, tiny, aggressive introvert obsessed by coral polyps, whose racism was extreme even by Confederate standards. If Semmes discovered large numbers of Black sailors aboard a captured vessel, he simply cast them adrift in the ocean.
The Confederates had numerous spies operating in Britain, the most important of whom was Victor Buckley, a junior official in the Foreign Office able to tip off Bulloch when the authorities were getting close. The son of a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo and a godson of Queen Victoria, Buckley was an upper-class fop, penniless and greedy, and therefore ripe for recruitment. Like many spies, he was undone by his sudden, conspicuous wealth, which he invested in the cotton trade….
Early in 1863, Bulloch laid plans to build two vast ironclads, 224 feet in length, equipped with rotating gun turrets, powerful engines, thick iron armor and bulbous metal rams extending from the prow to batter the enemy. With these two floating behemoths, he intended to “sweep the blockading fleet from the sea,” before steaming on to attack Washington, Portsmouth, Philadelphia and New York.
Since these armored “rams” could never be disguised as civilian ships, Bulloch hatched an elaborate plot with a dodgy French shoemaker turned financier to make it appear that the ships were French-owned and commissioned by the pasha of Egypt. But things went awry: The pasha died; the Foreign Office subjected the paperwork to uncomfortable scrutiny; and by now pro-Confederate feeling was evaporating fast in Britain. The government swiftly rumbled the plot. A dejected Bulloch was forced to sell the half-built battleships to the British.
…The Alabama was sunk off Cherbourg, France, by the U.S.S. Kearsarge, and the ghastly Semmes was plucked from the water by an English sightseer who had come to watch the engagement in his yacht. On his return to the South, Semmes was promoted to rear admiral; he died in 1877 after eating a bad shrimp. In his novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Jules Verne is thought to have based Captain Nemo’s Nautilus on the Alabama.
Buckley, the spy in the Foreign Office, was never unmasked: partly through insufficient evidence, but also because prosecuting the queen’s godson for espionage was just not the done thing in Victorian Britain.
Dudley returned to New Jersey, reopened his law practice, became director of a gaslight company and then drifted into obscurity. Bulloch remained in Liverpool, took British citizenship and made occasional discreet trips to the United States, where he entertained his nephew Teddy Roosevelt with tales of the sea.
In 1882, Roosevelt published “The Naval War of 1812,” the book that brought him to prominence. In the acknowledgments, Roosevelt thanked Bulloch for his “advice and sympathy.” The future president did not mention that “Uncle Jimmie” was also the spy who, if his naval espionage plans had succeeded, would have broken America in two.
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