Naval Service and European Agent of Confederacy
Bulloch served in the United States Navy for 15 years before resigning his commission to join a private shipping company in 1854. When the southern states attempted to leave the Union and the Civil War began in 1861, one of the first acts of Washington was to begin a strangling Federal naval blockade on the Confederacy. In April 1861 while his ship was in New Orleans, he offered to assist the Confederate States of America, when he returned to New York, he found a letter from Confederate Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin accepting his offer and ordering him to Montgomery, Georgia for his assignment. Bulloch soon became a Confederate secret service agent and their "most dangerous man" in Europe according to Union State Department officials.
In less than two months after the attack on Fort Sumter, Bulloch arrived at Liverpool, England, and established a base of operations there. Britain was officially neutral in the conflict between North and South, but private and public sentiment favored the Confederacy. Britain was also willing to buy all the cotton that could be smuggled past the Union blockade, which provided the South with its only real source of hard currency. Bulloch established a relationship with the shipping firm of Fraser & Trenholm to buy and sell Confederate cotton; Fraser Trenholm became, in effect, the Confederacy's international bankers. Bulloch arranged for the construction and secret purchase of the commerce raider CSS Alabama as well as many of the blockade runners that acted as the Confederacy's commercial lifeline. Bulloch arranged for cotton to be converted to hard currency, which he used to purchase war material including arms and ammunition, uniforms, and other supplies. Bulloch also arranged for the construction of the CSS Florida and with the Alabama, these two ships were destined to prey upon the Union's merchant shipping. James' brother, Irvine, would serve and fight on the CSS Alabama. James also purchased a large quantity of naval supplies. Next, realizing that he must arrange for a steady flow of new funds before he could go much farther with his purchasing program and also prompted by the fact that the materiel of war that he had already acquired would be useless to the Confederate cause as long as it remained in England—he decided to buy a steamship (the SS Fingal which was later renamed the CSS Atlanta), to fill it with the ordnance that he and an agent of the Southern War Department had accumulated, and to take her to America. Bulloch returned to England and continued his business relationship with Fraser & Trenholm in Liverpool. Bulloch was also involved in constructing and acquiring a number of other warships and blockade runners for the Confederacy, including purchase of the Sea King which was renamed the CSS Shenandoah. Bulloch instructed Captain James Iredell Waddell to sail “into the seas and among the islands frequented by the great American whaling fleet, a source of abundant wealth to our enemies and a nursery for their seamen. It is hoped that you may be able to greatly damage and disperse that fleet.” The CSS Shenandoah fired the last shots of the war on 28 June 1865 during a raid on American whalers in the Bering Sea.
- See also: Blockade runners of the American Civil War
Read more about this topic: James Dunwoody Bulloch
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