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ironclad rams at the Lairds shipyard in Liverpool, costing £94,000 each, that would never leave dry dock if he did not pay up in time. In Scotland, two agents for the Confederate navy, one of them the hapless James North, were in an equally perilous relationship with the shipwrights on the Clyde. If these ships could be let loose upon the Federal navy, they would, in Bulloch’s words, “sweep away the entire blockading fleet of the enemy.”27 The modifications he had suggested would enable his cruisers to fight in any waters. Mobile, heavily gunned, and armed with menacing iron rams, they were a new breed of fighting machine. But in the meantime, Bulloch had until March to come up with the final installment.

Bulloch was polite to Maury, but clearly regarded him as an added burden. Apart from the financial headache of yet another agent seeking pay and expenses, he feared that every new Confederate operation threatened the security of his own. Just before Maury’s arrival, Bulloch had informed Richmond via a secure channel that sneaking the ships past the British authorities would be difficult, and “will require to be conducted with such caution and secrecy that I fear to mention the plan even in this way.” The chief British ports had received orders to prevent the departure of any other Alabamas. Hampered by one of the worst winters in many years, the builders had put up temporary sheds and were using expensive gaslight in order to work around the clock. Even so, construction was coming along slowly.28 “Have tried very hard to hasten the completion, but insurmountable difficulties have occurred,” Bulloch wrote in code, trusting that the cipher had not been broken by Federal agents. “No armoured ships for Admiralty have ever been completed in time specified; whole character of work new, and builders cannot make close calculations; great labour and unexpected time required to bend armour-plates; and the most important part of the work, the riveting, is far more tedious than anticipated.”29

The first attempt to solve the Confederates’ debt crisis was made by James Spence and William Schaw Lindsay, MP. Spence had at last achieved his wish and been appointed the South’s financial agent for Europe. Eager to untangle the Confederates’ wayward affairs, he and Lindsay came up with the ingenious idea of floating cotton bonds on the London market, sidestepping the fact that two-thirds of the Confederacy’s wealth was tied up in slaves and land. As long as the Southern government could guarantee the flow of cotton to England, it would be a cheap way of raising money. Mason enthusiastically endorsed the idea. But Spence was outmaneuvered by John Slidell and Caleb Huse, who championed an alternative loan proposal by the French banker Frédéric Emile, Baron d’Erlanger. There were several reasons why Slidell preferred to work with the Frenchman. Erlanger et Cie was one of the great European banking houses, similar to Rothschilds and Barings, and had lent money to the French government. Moreover, the baron was desperately in love with Slidell’s daughter, the beautiful Mathilda. He had been introduced to her during a business trip to New Orleans and had never recovered from the meeting. (The two were married in October 1864).30

Spence and Slidell fought over the Erlanger proposal throughout January 1863. The baron was amazed to have his dealings questioned by a provincial businessman and flicked Spence’s questions aside. Such treatment only incensed Spence all the more: he refused “to be treated with something like polite contempt,” he told Mason. “I am not the man to take it easily.” He had no choice. The Confederate secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, did not like the terms of the Erlanger loan, particularly the 5 percent commission, but he was anxious to drag the emperor into closer ties with the Confederacy. On January 29, the Confederate Congress voted to approve the Erlanger loan.31

The real threat to Bulloch’s ironclad rams, however, was not the lack of funds but Federal infiltration of his inner circle. The U.S. consuls, Thomas Haines