by Philip Leigh. Hardbound, 182 pages, 6" x 9". In Trading with the enemy, Philip Leigh recounts the little known story of clandestine commerce between the North and South. Cotton was so important to the Northern economy that Yankees began growing it on the captured Sea Islands of South Carolina. Soon the neutral port of Matamoros, Mexico became a major trading center, where nearly all the munitions shipped to the port -much of it from Northern armories-went to the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, a frenzy of contraband-for-cotton swept across the vast trans-Mississippi Confederacy, with Northerners sometimes buying cotton directly from the Confederate government. A facinating study, Trading with the Enemy adds another layer to our understanding of the Civil War.