The subtitle of this book is “Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy”, and it does read somewhat like a spy thriller. Most of the action happens in, of all places, Liverpool, England. The American Consul assigned to Liverpool, which had a number of companies who were very good at building ships, was trying to prevent an agent sent by the Confederate government from acquiring any. British law, at that time, had a loophole that allowed this to be a possibility.
One thing I did not know was that, at least at the beginning of the war, there was much sympathy in England for the Southern States. I had assumed that since England had eliminated slavery, they would be on the side of the North. Between the challenge of communication across the pond, and the fact that American Southerners in England tried to drum up support for their cause, many English thought the South was fighting for their freedom. According to Rose, the attitudes shifted after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the English realized that the South may have been fighting for their “freedom”, but not for anyone else’s.
I had been vaguely aware of Union blockades on Southern ports, at least, I knew Rhett Butler might have been involved in something shady in that regard. This book paints them as more important to the war than I had realized. Not only was the South trying to get weapons and supplies, but they were also still trying to export their cotton. And cotton was wanted in Liverpool. Not to give anything away, but it’s always interesting to speculate about how things would be different today, if the past had played out differently. If the South had managed to defeat the blockade on their ports, and import supplies and export cotton to pay for them, could they have won the war?
If this was your family, how would you research them? If you had ancestors who lived in the United States in the Civil War era, they would have been impacted in some way by the war. The Soldiers and Sailors database has information about the, well, soldiers and sailors who served in the Civil War. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm. For governmental appointees, a hometown newspaper might mention the fact, or try https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ first, or a census might mention an employer.