A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (145 page)

30.
Arlington, Virginia, plantation home of General Robert E. Lee before the war, seized by the Union in 1861.

31.
General Josiah Gorgas (1818–83), Confederate chief of ordnance. He kept Southern armies supplied with arms throughout the war despite the blockade and an immense shortage of raw materials.

32.
Judah P. Benjamin (1811–84), Confederate secretary of state. Known as “Jefferson’s Pet Jew,” Benjamin served Davis unquestioningly and even took the blame for mistakes that were not his own. The blockade prevented him from directing an effective or timely foreign policy.

33.
Stephen Mallory (1817–73), Confederate secretary of the navy, one of the longest-serving members of President Davis’s Cabinet. Mallory’s strategy of building the Confederate navy in Great Britain almost brought the Northern and British governments to war.

34.
James Dunwoody Bulloch (1823–1901) (left), with his half-brother Irvine. Bulloch was the Confederacy’s chief secret agent in England and architect of the program to build Confederate commerce raiders in Britain and France. “He is the most dangerous man the South have here and fully up to his business,” claimed the head of the U.S. secret service in Europe.

35.
Henry Hotze (1833–97). Hotze was sent to England to be the chief Confederate propagandist in Europe and founded the pro-Southern journal Index. He was an expert at influencing public opinion: an editor “should see with the eyes of the public, and hear with the ears of the public, and yet have eyes and ears of his own.”

36.
James Murray Mason (1798–1871), Confederate commissioner in England. Mason and his fellow commissioner John Slidell were sailing to Europe to take up their posts when their ship, the British mail packet Trent, was stopped by Captain Wilkes of the U.S. Navy. Britain demanded an apology for the “attack” on her mail ship and the release of the two men. The Trent affair very nearly took the United States and Britain to war.

37.
John Slidell (1793–1871), Confederate commissioner in France. “He is an excellent judge of mankind, adroit, persevering, and subtle, full of device and fond of intrigue,” wrote William Howard Russell. If Slidell were shut up in a dungeon, he “would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”

38.
The shipyard of the Laird brothers, Liverpool, builders of the CSS Alabama. The cotton trade had helped to make Liverpool rich and had given it deep ties with the South. The majority of blockade runners sailed from Liverpool, and Fraser, Trenholm, the Confederacy’s bankers, had their offices at 10 Rumford Place. Lord Russell complained that the city was “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”

39.
Federal troops marching through New Orleans. Before the war, New Orleans was the fourth largest city in the country and the South’s premiere port. It also had the largest immigrant population of the South.