Guns for Cotton: England Arms the Confederacy (review)

book reviews267 The six hundred endured many privations, including insults from guards, theft of possessions, and near-starvation. The author records their escape attempts and their attitude toward each other and their situation. The Civil War veteran who survived captivity endured as much, if not more, than the soldiers who endured combat. The Federal bureaucracy wished to make the six hundred an example ofwhat could happen if the Confederates continued to mistreat Federal prisoners. Several times the Federals seemed ready to end the policy of retaliation, but some misstep always seemed to block the improvement of conditions. Joslyn has done a superb job of locating manuscripts, diaries, and photographs of the six hundred. She integrates their personal recollections with a concise summary of events and also includes adequate personal background of the key participants and a short overview of what happened to them after they returned home. A comparison of the experience of the six hundred to the Federal experience at Andersonville might have yielded interesting parallels. Captives Immortal makes compelling reading. The descriptions of captivity bring the inhumanity of war to the reader. Both the general reader and the specialist will benefit from this study. Damon Eubank Campbellsville University Guns for Cotton: England Arms the Confederacy. By Thomas Boaz. (Shippensburg , Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1996. Pp. ix, 86. $9.95.) Battlefield preservationist Thomas Boaz's Guns for Cotton is a lightly annotated primer about Confederate supply operations in Great Britain. Its mere fifty pages oftext follow the activities ofConfederate procurement agents such as James Dunwoody Bulloch, Caleb Muse, and Edward C.Anderson, particularly the arrangements that they effected with suppliers Fraser, Trenholm & Co. of Liverpool and two London firms—the LondonArmoury Company and S. Isaac, Campbell & Company. Boaz traces the Confederate agents' competition for military supplies with Union purchasers as well as with Confederate and Southern state agents who interfered with their rhythms (including the Confederate War Department's William G. Crenshaw, who wrongfully accused Muse ofcorruption ). He explains how the Confederate government funded its purchases, and he describes arrangements for shipping supplies from Britain to Southern ports. Boaz observes that the Confederacy cut its costs by increasingly using government-owned steamers, and he explains blockade-running operations to and from the British islands of Nassau and Bermuda. Boaz's story is positioned within the context of "King Cotton diplomacy," the Erlanger Loan, and other matters familiar to students of Civil War diplomacy. Boaz argues that Civil War historians who emphasize deprivations in the Confederate military mislead their readers. Though he does not seem to have 268CIVIL WAR HISTORY consulted Richard F. Beringer et al. Why the South Lost the Civil War or its abridgement (The Elements of Confederate Defeat), he reaches the same conclusion regarding the Union blockade: it was porous—a failure until Union military forces captured Wilmington, North Carolina, in January 1865. Confederate armies, "under normal circumstances" (68), had the uniforms, shoes, shoulder arms, blankets and meat that they needed to keep fighting. Boaz rejects "the now-mythical image of the 'ragged rebels'" (68). Boaz wrongly identifies ship 290 in a Harper's Weekly cartoon (38) as a Laird ram (290 was actually the preliminary designation for what became the commerce-raiderAlabama). He carelessly applies the date ofthe U.S. NeutralityAct ofApril 20, 1 8 1 8, for Britain's Foreign EnlistmentAct of 1 8 19 (2 1 ). More annoyingly, Boaz fails to clarify the legal status of Confederate supply operations , beyond noting that British officials applied a "loose interpretation oftheir own laws" (22) to both Confederate and Union purchases. Boaz explains clauses in Britain's Enlistment Act that inhibited the fitting out of Confederate warships in Britain. But since he never identifies specific clauses of that act or QueenVictoria's proclamation ofneutrality that governed the contracts for army supplies, the whole matter of whether these operations contravened British neutrality is left murky. Although this book lacks originality in research or interpretation, it nonetheless provides a handy introduction to the subject of Confederate supply that should prove helpful to readers unwilling to tackle more demanding works, such as Richard I. Lester's Confederate Financing and Purchasing in Great Britain (1975). A well-chosen illustration section of twenty...