Mrs. Hariott Cross Foster, a widow, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1857. They had five children together. Naval service and European agent of Confederacy Bulloch served in the United States Navy for about 15 years before resigning his commission in 1854 to join a private shipping company. When the Southern states seceded from the Union and the Civil War began in 1861, one of the Union's first acts was to create a naval blockade of Confederate ports to cut off commerce in the South. In April 1861, while his ship was in New Orleans, Bulloch offered to assist the Confederate States of America. When he returned to New York, he found a letter from C.S.A. Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin accepting his offer and ordering him to Montgomery, Alabama, for his assignment. James D. Bulloch soon became a Confederate secret agent and their "most dangerous man" in Europe, according to Union State Department officials. Less than two months after the attack on Fort Sumter, Bulloch arrived at Liverpool, England, and established a base of operations there. Britain was officially neutral in the conflict between North and South, but private and public sentiment was divided between the two belligerents. British merchants were also willing to buy all the cotton that could be smuggled past the Union blockade, which provided the South with its only real source of revenue. Bulloch established a relationship with the shipping firm of Fraser, Trenholm, & Company to buy and sell Confederate cotton; the company became, in effect, the Confederacy's international bankers. George Trenholm served as Treasurer of the Confederacy in the last year of the war. Bulloch worked closely with Charles K. Prioleau who handled Confederacy funding in England and arranged for the construction and secret purchase of the commerce raider CSS Alabama. He arranged for cotton to be converted to hard currency, which he in turn used to purchase badly needed war materiel, including arms and ammunition, uniforms, and naval supplies. He also arranged for the construction of the CSS Florida; along with the Alabama, the ship preyed upon the Union's merchant fleet. James' younger half-brother, Irvine S. Bulloch, served in the Confederate States Navy on the Alabama. Realizing that he needed a steady flow of funds to support the purchasing program as well as a way to ship materiel from England, Bulloch decided to buy a steamship, the SS Fingal, which was renamed the