Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months that Gave America the Emancipation

[Thomas Thorne]

The law was rather a mess.

James Bulloch, the Confederate naval agent and uncle of future president Theodore Roosevelt,brainstormed with British lawyers and came up with the idea that if a ship armed and outfitted outside the UK, the builders were absolved of all responsibility. The British law officers did not entirely buy this theory by their repeated questioning of the builders but Lairds was smart enough to plead ignorance of the intentions and even identity of their real clients and left few traces for investigators to chew on.
Tom