Lincoln's Man in Liverpool: Consul Dudley and the Legal Battle to Stop Confederate Warships (review)

According to his acknowledgments, Coy F. Cross II was inspired to write Lincoln's Man in Liverpool because he felt previous works had not done full justice to Thomas Dudley's service as the American consul in Liverpool during the American Civil War. Cross asserts that the last account of Dudley's activities, David H. Milton's Lincoln's Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (2003), focused too narrowly on intelligence gathering. For Cross, Dudley was not only a spymaster but "a zealous Quaker who thwarted Confederate shipbuilding in England, a lawyer whose evidence gained the United States a fifteen million dollar claim settlement, and a diplomat whose contributions helped create an enduring peace with the country that had been our greatest rival" (156). While burnishing Dudley's credentials as a diplomat, Cross makes an apparent nod to Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) when he claims that Dudley and Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain, "meshed into a powerful team" that resembled the partnership between William Seward and Abraham Lincoln.

Cross describes how Dudley collected legal evidence while attempting to compel the British government to seize the CSS Florida, Alabama, Alexandra, Georgia and the famous Laird rams under the terms of Britain's Foreign Enlistment Act (1819). This narrative ranges far afield, including everything from the activities of James Bulloch, the Confederacy's chief naval agent in Britain, to the depredations of Confederate commerce raiders, to the machinations of Napoleon III and French shipbuilders. While necessary to forming a complete picture of Dudley's world, this material reveals the extent to which Dudley was merely one player among many others in this complex story. Indeed, Cross's narrative, from which Dudley is often absent for pages at a time, inadvertently undermines the author's assertions concerning Dudley's significance. While Cross's story convincingly describes Dudley as an energetic defender of American interests who aggressively gathered information that hampered Confederate shipbuilding in Britain, this account does not show how the consul filled the roles of lawyer or diplomat. If the information supplied by Dudley influenced the Alabama claims or Anglo-American diplomacy, he neither assembled the American case nor conducted American policy.

Cross appears thoroughly at home with all of the primary and secondary sources immediately relevant to Dudley. At times, however, his grasp of the larger historiography concerning Anglo-American relations is not as firm. For instance, Cross's account of the British cabinet's agonizing over intervention in the fall of 1862 neither fully explains British motives nor mentions the important November 11 meeting that settled the matter once and for all. In part, minor problems such as these are due to old sources or certain omissions. For example, Frank Merli and David Fahey's The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War (2004) is conspicuously absent from the endnotes and bibliography. Another more substantial problem is that Lincoln's Man in Liverpool does not make a novel contribution to the historiography of the field. In relying so heavily on a small selection of secondary works like Douglas H. Maynard's Ph.D. dissertation, "Thomas H. Dudley and Union Efforts to Thwart Confederate Activities in Great Britain" (1951), and well-known primary accounts such as Bulloch's The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe (1883), Cross has shed little new light on Dudley or Federal efforts to halt the Confederate naval program in Britain. Scholars familiar with this field will have read much of this information elsewhere; those looking for an introduction to this story will probably want a more general survey less focused on Dudley.