The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy

In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”

From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes. 

One spy must build a navy from scratch. The other must stop him at all costs.

• International Espionage: The battleground isn’t Gettysburg, but the smoky shipyards and back rooms of Liverpool, where British loyalties and fortunes are up for grabs.
• Spy vs. Spy: Meet Confederate mastermind James Bulloch and his Union counterpart Thomas Dudley, a Quaker abolitionist, locked in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse that will determine the war’s fate at sea.
• The Birth of the Confederate Navy: Follow the clandestine mission to build a fleet of deadly commerce raiders and blockade runners, financed by the South’s cotton wealth and designed to cripple the Union.
• Untold Civil War History: Based on meticulous research, this is the astonishing, little-known story of the naval and intelligence war fought across the Atlantic, a struggle that nearly brought Great Britain in on the side of the Confederacy.