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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.

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