Aesop’s fable of “The Fox and The Lion” carries a moral: “Acquaintance with evil blinds us to its dangers.” The ancient tale is of a fox who is at first terrified of the king of the jungle. Gradually, however, through repeated exposure to the lion, the fox loses his proper sense of caution and risks his life by approaching the lion directly.
I doubt that the historian Alexander Rose had that moral in mind when he selected the title for his account of the contest in England during the Civil War between a Confederate agent who tried to arrange for the construction of a Southern fleet and a Union consul who labored to stop him.1 Yet, in a metaphorical way, it reminds us of Aesop’s message.
The routine practice of owning, selling, and breeding slaves had made a great many living in the South unconscious of the enormity of involuntary servitude. Thus, while southerners were not often placed in physical danger by their entanglement in “the peculiar institution,” they were set in a spiritual jeopardy, one that drew them towards the most elaborate of rationalizations. In this way, they came to see themselves as oppressed freedom fighters, and this belief served them as a ready justification for their attempts to circumvent British law.
The statute most at issue in Rose’s tale, dating from 1817, said that no one within the United Kingdom was permitted to purchase a ship intended for the wartime purposes of a foreign power. Dixie sought to get around this by funding the construction of what seemed to be merchant vessels. These were designed, however, so that after a single passage to a foreign port they could be converted into warships.
To keep the British Foreign Office in the dark about what was happening, the boats were provided with false manifests on behalf of fictitious owners. The undertaking revolved around the efforts of one man, a former U.S. Navy captain and southern grandee named James Bulloch. In Rose’s colorful and skillfully researched narrative of nineteenth-century spycraft, Bulloch is the fox, and a devout Quaker lawyer from the North, Thomas Dudley, is the lion.
Possessed of but one ship in their navy at the commencement of the war and without shipbuilding drydocks, the Southerners sent Bulloch on a secret mission to Liverpool, which was then the world’s greatest center for maritime construction. There Bulloch was provided with funds to arrange for a host of newly manufactured raiding craft. The Confederates hoped that these would strike at Northern ships, drawing the Union navy away from its task of blockading Southern ports. The money for the ships was to come from the same Southern cotton that the Union navy was trying to prevent the South from exporting.
Rose’s story makes use of an array of sources, but three appear to have been vital: the largely forgotten memoirs of the two antagonists and the official papers of the U.S. diplomatic corps. These latter documents served as evidence when America made post–Civil War damage claims against Britain. Rose has sifted through these for Dudley’s detailed day-by-day espionage reports on the activities of Bulloch and his assorted conspirators, moles, and furtive allies.
Rose’s retelling makes for lively reading. Part of the story’s appeal is the author’s use of accounts of detectives trailing one another and of secret agents taking on imaginative disguises. Also of interest are the many eminent and mighty figures who make appearances as supporting players. Bulloch’s memoirs reached print because Teddy Roosevelt was his affectionate nephew; when the future president became a best-selling author and an investor in a publishing house, he was able to arrange for its publication. Dudley’s superior was the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy and the grandson of John Adams. The Briton charged with handling the Confederate plot was John Russell, an earl and two-time prime minister who was the grandfather of Bertrand Russell.
The most famous of the ships to depart Britain for the Confederate States of America was the Alabama. While the considerable destruction the ship wrought was the principal justification for the eventual $15 million judgment against the United Kingdom, its effect on the war’s outcome was negligible. Of much greater potential significance were two enormous ironclads that Bulloch had arranged for. These were to be sent as instruments for assaults on the great cities of the North. But Russell intervened to prevent this. Acting on instinct and without clear evidence, he ordered the ships detained. This decision was soon substantiated when intelligence turned up showing that they were not the property of an Egyptian sultan as had been claimed, and that they were instead meant to serve as warships, as Dudley and Adams had maintained.
Rose does a good job of reporting on the political developments that supported Russell’s action. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, England became staunchly in favor of the Union. This sentiment even came to predominate among the workers in Liverpool’s shipyards and in textile factories that depended upon the South’s “white gold”: cotton.
The story has a relevance to our own time in the phenomenon of our indifference to evil and the importance of industrial capacity. Can we deny that our increasing reliance upon Chinese manufacture has provided us with a reason to turn a blind eye to the widespread practices of captivity and forced labor in the so-called People’s Republic? Can we not admit that our dependence upon this production could eventually leave us with a reduced ability to do what the North was able to do—defeat its enemies on the open seas?
Many believe that the formal institution of slavery is gone and that it will never reappear. But is there really so much difference between what the South practiced and what Xi Jinping’s regime does today—or what it might attempt if it had still greater power and the shameless disregard for legal niceties and morality that the practice of human bondage might inspire?
