THE BUSINESS OF SELLING SLAVES had been changing in Charleston. It was no longer as picturesque as it had been when William Makepeace Thackeray first visited. In 1856, the city decided the auctions near the Old Exchange and Custom House were out of hand, and the various slave brokers started opening up their own showrooms, with pens outside to hold the chattel. Probably this was a relief for Bunch, who had had to pass the auction block almost daily as he performed his duties around town. But it also signaled a shift in the dynamics of the market. Slave auctions were too big, and the action too important, to be conducted on the street.
In financial terms, slaves in the South had become the stuff that dreams were made of. More than land, cotton, rice, or sugar, owning slaves came to be considered the standard measure of prosperity, the safest investment, and the most profitable commodity for speculation. “This alliance between Negroes and cotton, we will venture to say, is now the strongest power in the world,” wrote James De Bow, editor of the widely read De Bow’s Review in New Orleans, “and the peace and welfare of Christendom absolutely depend upon the strength and security of it.”
A pro-slavery crusade that could no longer be ignored was taking shape in the South, its centerpiece the fight to reopen the trade with Africa. One of the most passionate and persuasive advocates was William Yancey of Alabama. He could move an audience to tears, then beyond tears to calls for secession. The Virginian Edmund Ruffin, a soil expert and agrarian ideologue with piercing blue eyes and a mane of shoulder-length gray hair, was the grand old man of the movement, while Robert Barnwell Rhett and his Charleston Mercury competed with Leonidas Spratt and his Standard to keep the fires of the slave trade and secession burning brightly in Charleston.
The newly changed atmosphere in South Carolina made Bunch’s life and work harder than ever. In December 1855 Spratt had put himself directly in Bunch’s path on the question of the Negro Seamen law. Earlier, Governor Adams, to the surprise of many but not, of course, Bunch, had spoken out in favor of amendments to the law during his address to the legislature, and much of the phrasing he used was picked up verbatim from the letter Bunch had written and Clarendon approved for Adams’s “information and guidance.” Adams had concluded, “I do not think that our safety requires a law of such unrelenting and indiscriminate severity. The remedy is worse than the disease it seeks to cure.”
Spratt did not bother with such common sense. “Our greatest objection to the changes is in the fact that it will be a concession to anti-slavery sentiment,” Spratt wrote. “Foreign States”—meaning Britain, of course—“contend that there is a natural right in the Negro to a state of freedom, and they have navies to prevent his introduction to our country as a slave. We contend that slavery is a natural condition of the Negro.”
Once again, to Bunch’s dismay and frustration, the amendments to the law failed to pass.
By the end of 1856, Bunch had reinforced Clarendon’s confidence in him with his dispatches on Kansas and the American elections. He had also visited London and, doubtless, met with the Foreign Secretary, although when they talked and what they talked about is not revealed in their official or their unofficial correspondence.
What is clear is that Bunch’s scope of action, necessarily, was growing broader. The explosive atmosphere around the issues of slavery and the slave trade, and the bellicose eruptions of hostility between the United States and Britain, heightened the need at the Foreign Office for more and better information from the United States and increased Foreign Office reliance on its man in Charleston. Bunch remained interested in getting the Negro Seamen law changed, hopeless though that seemed, but he began to focus more of his attention on bigger issues.
He did not need to look far afield. South Carolina’s politics were fraught with surprises that had national and international implications. As the 1856 legislative session opened, Governor Adams gave an address that left even Bunch at a loss for words. Not only did the formerly hospitable master of Live Oak Plantation say nothing at all about the changes to the Negro Seamen law that he and Bunch had discussed at such length and that he’d endorsed in such carefully cribbed language the year before, but now he attacked the British Empire as a hostile competitor with South Carolina’s interests and reached a conclusion, after citing some surprising statistics and employing rather original economic logic, that set his state and, indeed, the whole South on a collision course with the United Kingdom.
The amount of cotton being produced outside the American South, especially in British possessions, “should open our eyes to our true policy,” said Adams. The idea that only African slaves can successfully grow cotton “is an entire mistake.” Peasants and “coolies” in India and other British dominions—Adams called them “free slaves”—were producing “more than the entire crop of the United States in 1820.” Adams cited a report from U.S. Secretary of State Marcy showing that in 1855 the United States had shipped roughly 679 million pounds of cotton to Great Britain, while the East Indies, Egypt, and Brazil had shipped it 202 million pounds.
Yes, the South still supplied almost 80 percent of England’s cotton, but the trend was going against it, and Adams claimed that this was all part of a British plot to free the slaves. “Whenever England and the Continent can procure their supply of the raw material elsewhere than from us, and the cotton States are limited to the home market, then will our doom be sealed,” Adams declared. “Destroy the value of slave labor, and emancipation follows inevitably,” he said. His oddly twisted conclusion: “To maintain our present position, we must have cheap labor also. This can be obtained in but one way—by re-opening the African slave trade.”
Then a few days later came a development that, in other circumstances, might have been a matter for celebration at the Bunch house and on Downing Street. Bunch wrote to Clarendon on the day after Christmas: “It is with great satisfaction that I have the honor of reporting to Your Lordship that the Legislature of South Carolina has passed an Act for the modification and amendment of the Law for the imprisonment of free persons of color arriving within the limits of the state.”
Col. John Harleston Read had reintroduced the same bill that was defeated at the last minute the year before, and at a crucial moment in the debate Charleston Courier editor Richard Yeadon, who was a member of the House, spoke up and carried the day. “At nine p.m. on the last night of the session, the act was ratified by both houses,” Bunch reported. Then he added, “The governor, perhaps fortunately in the present instance, has no veto power in this State.”
After three years, Bunch’s work on the Negro Seamen law had paid off, and it was a well-earned victory for Her Majesty’s consul. His core mission had been accomplished. But the constant flow of anti-British vitriol and, now, Adams’s amazing speech linking hatred for London with a call to reopen the Middle Passage, gave Bunch and his reporting a new purpose.
The South was headed toward a confrontation not only with the North but with Great Britain. Bunch had no doubt about that, even if others failed to see it.
Once again, his friends assured him that Adams was not to be taken seriously, that he was leaving office, anyway, since his term was up, and that he was really just a laughingstock. But Bunch wasn’t so sure. The man might be a fool and his ideas, as Bunch wrote, “anomalous,” but they could no longer be dismissed. The hideous traffic in African slaves to Cuba was growing. Tens of thousands were being landed there each year. Traffic in slaves to the Southern United States would be next if, indeed, it had not already begun. And should that happen, Bunch knew that he and his countrymen could be set against the Americans in a fight that was sure to be fiercely waged on both sides.