Confederate Secret Service Operations
From his base in Great Britain, Bulloch was the financier of covert Confederate naval operations within the British Empire. This aspect of his intelligence operations has eluded the many analysts and historians who have studied the Canadian elements of the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln. In late 1864, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory ordered Bulloch to write a check drawn on “secret funds” to Patrick Martin, a Confederate blockade runner operating from Canada. These funds were intended to support the plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. Martin’s project later morphed into the successful assassination plot. Captain Martin and his ship were lost in a storm in December 1864, as he was en route to Maryland with supplies for John Wilkes Booth. When John Surratt, the last surviving member of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, arrived in Liverpool in 1865, there is no evidence they made contact, but Bulloch had to maintain a very low profile.
Read more about this topic: James Dunwoody Bulloch
Famous quotes containing the words confederate, secret, service and/or operations:
“Figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it. But you have to be efficient if you’re going to be lazy.”
—Shirley Conran (b. 1932)
“We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke Wellington (1769–1852)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)