Percussion Pistol Inscribed to Confederate Officer J.D. Bulloch

Presentation Engraved French Percussion Pistol

See text below, from http://www.csa-dixie.com/Liverpool_Dixie, for a brief history on J.D. Bulloch.

Telescope 2 1/4" diameter, 10.25" long when collapsed, 39" long extended with shade, 36" extended without shade,

5 barrels plus shade, initials "JDB" engraved on the main barrel

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James Bulloch was a Confederate Naval Officer and Agent in England, while his half-brother Irvine Bulloch was the youngest officer on the CSS Alabama during the American Civil War. They were the uncles of Theodore Roosevelt Photo around 1865. James on the right.

James Dunwoody Bulloch (25 June 1823 – 7 January 1901) was the Confederate States of America's chief foreign agent in Great Britain during the American Civil War. He was the half-brother of a distinguished Confederate naval officer, Irvine Bulloch and of Martha Bulloch. Martha was the mother of future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and the grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt.

James D. Bulloch was born near Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Major James Stephens Bulloch and Esther Amarintha Elliot. After the death of his mother, his father enrolled James in private school in Hartford, Connecticut. Major Bulloch then married Martha (Stewart) Elliott on May 8, 1832. She was the second wife and widow of Senator John Elliott. James and Martha had four children: Anna Bulloch; Martha Bulloch; Charles Irvine Bulloch, who died at age three; and Irvine Bulloch.

In 1839 Major Bulloch moved his family to Cobb County in the upper Piedmont to become a partner with Roswell King in a new cotton mill there. In what would become Roswell, Georgia, the major had a grand home built, with the labor of craftsmen and slaves. When it was completed in 1842, the major and his family moved into Bulloch Hall.

Major Bulloch, a planter, also had land in cotton cultivation. After his death, in 1850 Martha Bulloch still held 31 enslaved African-Americans, according to the Slave Schedules.[1] Most of the slaves would have worked in the fields, but with such a large mansion, the Bullochs would also have assigned several slaves to domestic work of clothing and food production, and serving.

James D. Bulloch married Elizabeth Caskie in 1852. After her death, he married Hariott Cross Foster in 1858, and they had five children.

Bulloch served in the United States Navy for 14 years before joining a private shipping company. When the southern states attempted to leave the Union and the Civil War began in 1861, one of the first acts of Washington was to begin a strangling Federal naval blockade on the Confederacy. With these developments, Bulloch decided to serve the southern cause. In 1861, he offered to assist the Confederate States of America by travelling to Liverpool, to arrange the Confederacy's foreign affairs in England.

Knowing that the Confederacy was desperate for arms and cash, he quickly arranged for the construction of two fast and powerful cruisers, CSS Florida and CSS Alabama, these destined to prey upon the Union's merchant shipping. James' brother, Irvine, would serve and fight on the CSS Alabama. James also purchased a large quantity of naval supplies. Next, realizing that he must arrange for a steady flow of new funds before he could go much farther with his purchasing program and also prompted by the fact that the materiel of war that he had already acquired would be useless to the Confederate cause as long as it remained in England—he decided to buy a steamship (the CSS Atlanta), to fill it with the ordnance that he and an agent of the Southern War Department had accumulated, and to take her to America.

After turning the Atlanta over to the Confederate States Navy and conferring with Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Bulloch returned to England. He established a business relationship with the shipping firm of Fraser & Trenholm in Liverpool. Fraser & Trenholm would buy Southern cotton transported on blockade runners, thus providing Bulloch with the hard currency needed to purchase arms and other goods for the return trip. Bulloch was also involved in constructing and acquiring a number of other warships and blockade runners for the Confederacy, including purchase of the Sea King which was renamed the CSS Shenandoah. Bulloch instructed Captain James Iredell Waddell to sail “into the seas and among the islands frequented by the great American whaling fleet, a source of abundant wealth to our enemies and a nursery for their seamen. It is hoped that you may be able to greatly damage and disperse that fleet.” ^[1] The CSS Shenandoah fired the last shots of the war on 28 June 1865 during a raid on American whalers in the Bering Sea.

As secret Confederate agents, James and Irvine Bulloch were not included in the general amnesty that came on the heels of the Civil War. They therefore decided to stay in Liverpool, where they became cotton importers and brokers, and became quite successful.

During the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt persuaded his uncle "Jimmie" to write and publish an account of his activities during the Civil War. The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe was published in two volumes published in 1883. TR wrote to his mother telling of his success with the project saying, "I have persuaded him [James Bulloch] to publish a work which only he possesses the materials to write."^[2] In return, Uncle Jimmie provided help to TR on his War of 1812 naval history project.

In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt toured the South. After spending October 19 in North Carolina, and skipping South Carolina, Roosevelt visited Roswell, Georgia the next day. He spoke to the citizens there as his "neighbors and friends" and concluded his remarks as follows:

“It has been my very great good fortune to have the right to claim my blood is half southern and half northern, and I would deny the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every southerner than I feel. Of all the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who were born and brought up in that house on the hill there, my two uncles afterward entered the Confederate service and served with the Confederate Navy.

“One, the younger man, served on the Alabama as the youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one of her broadside 32-pounders in her final fight, and when at the very end the Alabama was sinking and the Kearsarge passed under her stern and came up along the side that had not been engaged hitherto, my uncle, Irvine Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the two last shots fired from the Alabama. James Dunwoody Bulloch was an admiral in the Confederate service. …

“Men and women, don’t you think I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the grey or whether they wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy the name feel an equal pride in the valor of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given to him to see his duty.”

In Roosevelt's autobiography, he mentions his Bulloch uncles as follows:

"My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine Bulloch, came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old retired sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a veritable Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy, and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the Alabama, and fired the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the Kearsarge. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war. "

My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone. The only occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of the best men I have ever known, and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy in both public and private life."

James died in Liverpool at 76 Canning Street, Canning, Liverpool, England in 1901 at 77. In his will he left $30,000 to his nephew, Theodore, soon to become the 26th US President. On his grave marker is the inscription, "an American by birth, an Englishman by choice."

The grave site can be visited at Totexth Cemetery, Smithdown Road, Toxteth, Liverpool, England. [2] [3] [4] [5]

      Irvine Bulloch half-brother

      Martha Bulloch sister and mother of Theodore Roosevelt

      Theodore Roosevelt nephew and 26th US President

      Eleanor Roosevelt grand-niece

      Bulloch, James D. "The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe; or, How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped." 1883.

1.    ^ "Last of the Rebel Raiders", American Heritage magazine, December 1958

2.    ^ McCullough biography, footnote on page 76

      http://www.bullochhall.org/ Bulloch Hall (Official Site)

      http://www.mersey-gateway.org/server.php?show=ConNarrative.101

      http://www.csa-dixie.com/liverpool_dixie/bulloch.htm

      http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?path=/GovernmentPolitics/MilitaryPresenceinGeorgia/MilitaryFigures&id=h-844

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dunwoody_Bulloch"

Categories: 1832 births | 1901 deaths | Americans of Scots-Irish descent | Americans of Scottish descent | Confederate States political leaders | Confederate States Navy | Bulloch family | People of Georgia (U.S. state) in the American Civil War | People from Roswell, Georgia