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.Ĭross 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).
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). Milton's Lincoln's Spymaster: Thomas Haines Dudley and the Liverpool Network (2003), focused too narrowly on intelligence gathering. Cross asserts that the last account of Dudley's activities, David H. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
