the lion and the fox: two rival spies and the secret plot to build a confederate navy

“With the contest of wits and bribes between Confederate agent James Bulloch and American consul Thomas Dudley, Alexander Rose has proven that true history is indeed stranger than fiction. This account of Confederation machinations in Liverpool to get Rebel warships built in British shipyards is peopled by a colorful array of special agents, detectives, spies, dockyard toughs, and a Southern mole in the British Foreign Office.”—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and War on the Waters

In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents — one a Confederate, the other his Union rival — were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gun- running and smuggling cotton — Dixie’s notorious “white gold” — would finance the scheme.

Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, where the dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”

The Lion and the Fox is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes.