• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6613 0

in the invidious position of having to turn away Northern supporters who wanted to help. When a deputation from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society visited the American legation in April, “expressing interest and sympathy with our cause,” he could only say a few platitudes about voluntary emancipation after the war.6 This “was not much to their liking,” according to Benjamin Moran.7 It was not enough for Adams to echo John Stuart Mill, that one set of people were fighting for independence in order to keep another in bondage; his listeners wanted him to promise abolition.

Although the slavery question was a persistent stumbling block for both sides in their bid to win public support in Britain, there was nothing to prevent them from waging unrestrained and barely concealed war on every other front. “Both the Northern and Southern parties have chosen to make this country a kind of supplemental fighting ground,” railed the Liverpool Mercury on April 10, 1862. “Their respective agents here have been extremely active in their efforts to promote their own cause, as well as to discover and thwart the plans of their opponents. Each party has a place here which may be styled its headquarters; each party has in its service a number of agents, scouts and spies.”

James Bulloch, the Confederate navy’s purchasing agent and architect of its overseas fleet, had returned to England on March 10 aboard one of Fraser, Trenholm’s commercial vessels. He had been expecting to hear that the Oreto—one of the two raiders commissioned the previous year—was already launched. Instead, he found the vessel bobbing uselessly in Liverpool harbor, in plain view of the world. He quickly went looking for a captain and crew who could sail it out of port before the authorities became suspicious of the empty but martial-looking ship in their midst.

Bulloch was too late. Federal agents had known about the Oreto for several weeks and were already trying to have her seized for contravening the Foreign Enlistment Act. Now that Henry Sanford had been forced to confine his operations to continental Europe, Bulloch’s new adversary was Thomas Haines Dudley, a dour but intrepid Quaker from New Jersey. As a young lawyer, Dudley had actively fought against slavery, taking extraordinary risks such as disguising himself as a slave trader, complete with whip and pistols, and traveling to the South to rescue a free black family who had been kidnapped and forced into slavery. But at the age of thirty-six, Dudley narrowly survived a ferryboat fire that killed more than thirty people, leaving him with permanent physical and mental scars. After his recovery he concentrated on politics; Lincoln, who owed him a sinecure for his help in securing the Republican nomination, had offered him either the legation in Japan or the lower position of consul in Liverpool. Dudley had chosen Liverpool because he thought the doctors would be better in England. Yet he did not intend to ride out his appointment like the timeserving secretary Charles Wilson at the legation in London.8 Dudley’s experience on the ferryboat had left him determined to live the rest of his life with force and conviction.

His personal appearance pleased no less a critic than Benjamin Moran, who thought him “as intelligent as he looks.”9 Tall and wavy-haired, with a sad-looking face that was framed by a neatly trimmed beard, he seemed unthreatening to Moran; but then Moran was not on the receiving end of Dudley’s surveillance operations. Within six months of his arrival at the Liverpool consulate, Dudley had created a new intelligence network that far outstripped Sanford’s effort. The team consisted of himself, his vice consul, Henry Wilding, the London consul, Freeman H. Morse, and a large number of operatives under the direction of Matthew Maguire, Ignatius Pollaky’s more reliable replacement. It was expensive to find spies who were both effective and trustworthy, but this was one area where Seward was prepared to be generous.10

Dudley was able to insert his men only around the fringes of Confederate society,