The Lion and the Fox
Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy
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4.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him.
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 gunrunning 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, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”
From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Rose (Washington's Spies) delivers an entertaining chronicle of the battle of wits between a Confederate spy and a Union agent in England during the early years of the Civil War. In 1861, ex-Union Navy officer James Bulloch sailed for Liverpool seeking to build a clandestine Confederate navy in order to break the Union blockade of Southern ports. His nemesis was U.S. consul Thomas Dudley, whose "Quaker rectitude, stiff-necked temperance, and remorseless work ethic" provided a jarring contrast to Bulloch's "designedly aristocratic style." Tracing Britain's 1861 Proclamation of Neutrality to the British view that the Civil War "was yet another of their rancorous colonial cousins' periodic fits of madness," Rose documents how Bulloch—aided by a well-placed mole in Britain's Foreign Office—exploited a loophole in the British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 to convince Liverpool's shipbuilders to manufacture the commerce raiders CSS Florida and CSS Alabama. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation helped turn the tide in Dudley's favor, however, as Britons came to view the war as "a humanitarian crusade to free the oppressed," rather than a fight to preserve the Union. Rose's indelible character sketches and firm grasp of the industrial and political milieu of 19th-century Britain enrich the contest of wills between Bulloch and Dudley. This spy-versus-spy tale delights.
