A Confederate spy plots to build the South’s navy with England’s help
by Barbara Spindel
Mar 22, 2023
4 minutes
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
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