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Mann and De Leon tried to distract Yancey with busywork while they negotiated a secret deal with Paul Julius de Reuter’s telegraph agency. Shortly before Bull Run, Reuter had personally approached both the U.S. legation and the Southerners for the exclusive right to distribute their official reports from America. Benjamin Moran had indignantly rebuffed him, but the Southerners knew there was great potential in the deal, since many English and European newspapers relied on Reuter’s telegrams for their American news.37 Moran soon rued his mistake; Reuter “is against us,” he grumbled in his diary. “He systematically prostitutes the monopoly he holds to depreciate the Union … there is no way to remedy the business but by buying the fellow up. This I would not do.”38 The sudden alteration from a pro-Northern to a pro-Southern tone made the U.S. consul in Leith wonder if the Scottish editors had been bribed. They “exaggerate as might be expected all the little mistakes of our Northern Army into a mountain,” he protested. “No sheet in South Carolina could serve them better.”39

William Yancey was also resentful of the patronizing way he was treated by the four purchasing agents who were buying arms for the South.40 It was his friendship with John Laird, MP, Yancey liked to point out, that had opened the door to the largest shipbuilding firm in Liverpool. In many ways, the Confederate cabinet regarded weaponry as of greater importance than diplomacy.41 Before the war, the North had manufactured 97 percent of the country’s weapons.42 The Confederacy had declared its independence with a mere 160,000 firearms and limited means of manufacturing any more. Only one factory in the entire South, the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, was capable of producing artillery. There was not enough time for the chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Major Josiah Gorgas, to develop the iron mines, erect the foundries, and build the factories required to equip a modern army. The soft-spoken Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, found his department in an equally deprived state. The Confederate navy had no warships and only two naval dockyards, in Pensacola, Florida, and Norfolk, Virginia. Its three hundred officers were on shore leave until Mallory could provide them with vessels. From the outset, Mallory accepted that he could not construct an entire navy; the best he could hope for, and perhaps all he really needed, was a few raiders to attack Northern merchant ships, and a small fleet of ironclad warships to attack the Federal blockade.43

The two Confederate agents selected by Gorgas and Mallory to run the international war effort were a far cry from the amateurs in charge of Southern diplomacy. Caleb Huse, the purchasing agent for the army, and James Dunwoody Bulloch, whom Mallory assigned to acquire ships for the navy, were men of the highest integrity and resourcefulness. Both had family and business connections in the North, but it was to the Confederacy’s immeasurable good fortune that their hearts belonged to the South. Major Huse was an artillery officer who had spent six months in Europe, courtesy of the U.S. Army, studying the armaments industry.44 The forty-year-old Bulloch was a former naval officer who had been working for a Northern mail company at the start of the war. He had not seen his native Georgia for ten years, but, he wrote, “my heart and my head were with the South.”45 He was about to sail his mail ship out of New Orleans when the guns at Fort Sumter began firing. In the face of bitter Southern opposition, Bulloch scrupulously insisted on returning the vessel to its rightful owners in New York. Only then did he offer his services to the Confederacy.

When Huse arrived in England in April, he had discovered that Northern agents had almost stripped the country of surplus arms. They were paying cash in advance, as though part of their mission was to prevent guns from reaching the Confederacy. Huse had come with limited funds; Edwin De Leon lent him