The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe

James D. Bulloch's The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe is the personal account of Jefferson Davis's secret man in London. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Confederacy tapped Bulloch to clandestinely acquire arms and ships for its navy. His first stop was London, a capital hedging its bets on who would win the War Between the States and willing to provide the Confederacy with the naval technology to fight the Union on the high seas. Bulloch's mission continued for the length of the war and ended in grand failure, sending him into self-imposed exile in Britain. More than a decade later, his nephew, a young Theodore Roosevelt, visited Bulloch in London while researching his history of the naval battles of the War of 1812. Only after advising the twenty-three-year-old Roosevelt did Bulloch decide to write his own book, putting to record one of the least understood aspects of the Civil War. Out of print and unavailable for more than forty years, Bulloch's story of building the Confederate navy stands as one of the most important military memoirs of the war between the North and the South.

James D. Bulloch was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1823 and became a midshipman in the U. S. navy at the age of sixteen. After the war he remained in England, where his nephew, a young Theodore Roosevelt, visited him in the 1870s while researching what would become his first book, The Naval War of 1812.

Philip Van Doren Stern (1900-1984) was one of the most influential Civil War historians of the twentieth century.