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

From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him.

“Entertaining and deeply researched…with a rich cast of spies, crooks, bent businessmen and drunken sailors…Rose relates the tale with gusto.” -The New York Times

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. 

Based on declassified documents and forgotten letters, this gripping true story reveals:

• Clandestine Operations: Follow Confederate agent James Bulloch and his Union rival Thomas Dudley in a relentless contest of intrigue, gambit, and betrayal on the streets of Liverpool.
• The Secret Plot to Build a Navy: Uncover Bulloch’s audacious plan to use British shipyards to construct a fleet of commerce raiders and ironclads designed to shatter the Union blockade.
• King Cotton Diplomacy: Discover how the Confederacy planned to leverage Britain’s dependence on Southern cotton—so-called "white gold"—to finance its secret navy and draw the world’s greatest empire into the war.
• A Vivid, Forgotten Theater of War: Experience the squalor and intrigue of Dickensian Liverpool, the unlikely battleground where corrupt merchants, drunken sailors, and secret agents decided the fate of the American Civil War.

Alexander Rose is the author of Washington’s Spies (the basis for the AMC drama series, Turn), Empires of the Sky, Men of War, and several other nonfiction books. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He writes the Spionage newsletter at Substack.