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By Root 7018 0

$10,000 of his own money, but it was not nearly enough to outbid the Federal agents.46 Huse was rescued by Charles Prioleau, the director of the merchant shipping firm Fraser, Trenholm and Co. in Liverpool, who agreed to advance him the payments for his weapons. Prioleau was from Charleston, a fact he proudly advertised by fixing the “bonnie blue” star of South Carolina above his front door. Moreover, his firm was the British arm of a large Charleston firm called John Fraser and Co. There was already an agreement in place between the Confederacy and Fraser, Trenholm for the company to act as the South’s financial agents in Europe. But Prioleau was going much further by giving credit to Huse without a guarantee in place.

He did the same for James Bulloch when the naval agent arrived the following month in a similar condition. Bulloch had no difficulty finding Fraser, Trenholm’s Liverpool headquarters, which took up an entire three-story building near the docks.47 Although he took the precaution of using the back door, Bulloch was spotted by Federal spies who had been waiting for him. The Union report compiled on him had provided an extremely detailed description of his features; he was a “very dark, sallow man with black hair and eyes, whiskers down each cheek but shaved clean off his chin and … about 5’8" high.”48 For the first few days, Bulloch continued to creep about the city, until he read in the local newspapers the precise details of his mission. The information was all there, from the number of ships he was seeking to his means of paying for them. It was, Bulloch wrote in astonishment, “as if the particulars had been furnished direct from the Treasury Department or from the pages of my instructions.”49

The man behind the exposure was the flamboyant American diplomat Henry Sanford, who had introduced William Howard Russell to Seward in March. Shortly thereafter, he had left Washington to take up the post of minister to Belgium. Sanford inspired contradictory reactions in people. Charles Sumner was one of his most loyal supporters; Charles Francis Adams had loathed him from the moment they met. Sanford was not awed by the Adams name; he himself was wealthy and well connected, had studied abroad, could speak several languages, and, although he was only thirty-eight, had served in numerous legations including those at St. Petersburg and Paris. In his own mind he was an ingenious sophisticate, a ladies’ man, and a puppeteer. To others, such as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, Sanford might have been tolerable were it not for his insatiable desire “to be busy and fussy, to show pomp and power.”50

Seward had diverted Sanford to Paris to serve as the interim minister until William L. Dayton could settle his affairs at home. But he expected Sanford to perform many roles and to travel widely. At one time, Seward entertained serious hopes that Garibaldi would agree to lead the Union war effort, since he had briefly lived in the United States during his exile in the 1850s, and one of Sanford’s tasks was to persuade Garibaldi to accept Seward’s offer. (Garibaldi told Sanford he was not interested unless abolition became the main objective of the war and he was made supreme commander of all U.S. forces.) Sanford’s most important mission was to counteract Confederate activity in Europe “by all proper means.”51 Sanford took these words literally, and from the moment he arrived in Europe focused his formidable energy on creating a surveillance network that stretched from London to Belgium. He wanted every rebel to have at least one Federal operative dogging his footsteps.52

Sanford knew even before Huse and Bulloch that two more Confederate agents were on their way. One of them, navy lieutenant James North, had orders to buy or commission two armored warships for the Confederacy. The other, Major Edward Anderson, would be working with Caleb Huse.53 They landed at Liverpool on June 25, by which time Sanford had hired a private detective of murky reputation named Ignatius Pollaky. Sanford told Seward that Pollaky