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John Baxter Langley: radicalism, espionage and the Confederate Navy in mid-Victorian Britain

ABSTRACT The article deals with the attempts by the Confederate military to utilize the shipbuilding facilities of Britain for the construction of warships, commerce raiders and blockade-runners. It also details Federal strategies to prevent these endeavors. In particular, it examines the actions of John Baxter Langley a British radical or ‘advanced Liberal’ who, motivated by an innate opposition to slavery, became involved in the American conflict. Langley represented a group of politically educated, working- and middle-class activists who generated a constant stream of pro Northern propaganda, newspaper editorials, meetings and demonstrations. In doing so they linked the poverty inflicted by the Northern cotton embargo with the similar, and greater suffering endured by the enslaved workers of the Southern states. Langley is perhaps unique in the fact that he became directly involved in the clandestine contest to create, or to uncover, foreign-built ships of war involved in the American Civil War.