IN THE FIRST WEEK OF March 1857 Robert Bunch wrote a confidential dispatch from Charleston that he hoped would have a profound effect on the views of Lord Clarendon and, if it could be gotten to him, of Prime Minister Palmerston. This was not one of Bunch’s acid glosses on current events; it was much more like a policy paper, and even if Bunch had never written another letter to the Crown, Dispatch No. 10, March 4, 1857, was a defining document. Forwarded without enclosures via a Royal Mail steamer from Boston, it was received at the Foreign Office in London some twenty days later. It was addressed directly to the Earl of Clarendon, and it bore the heading “Increase in the value of Negroes: scarcity of Labor in the Cotton fields: probable results.”
“So very remarkable a rise has of late taken place in the price of Negroes,” wrote Bunch on the opening page, “that I am desirous of calling Your Lordship’s attention to the subject.” Bunch was firmly confident as he laid out the sums and percentages, the antecedents and the consequences. Within “the last few years” the price of an able-bodied man had gone from $800 to $1,500, a woman from $600 to $1,400. The cause was simple: slaves were needed to pick cotton, and cotton production had increased about 3,000 percent in the first half of the century, while the population of slaves increased only 150 percent, according to Bunch. The natural growth of slave populations was inadequate and, Bunch wrote, could not begin to make up the difference. The effect was perfectly predictable: to meet the demand for cotton, the South would be forced to reopen the slave trade with Africa. “Such is the evil which is rapidly developing,” wrote the Charleston consul.
Eventually, Bunch predicted in Dispatch No. 10, the economic arithmetic would prevail over all other objections. The idea of reopening the trade was widely discussed and often denounced, but “it will grow in favor as the necessity for fresh laborers becomes more pressing. When this time shall arrive, England will be placed in a position of some difficulty.” On the one hand, Bunch reminded Clarendon, England depended on the South for four-fifths of her raw cotton. On the other, “She will find that it is only to be obtained at the price of the renewal of a trade which is opposed by the universal sentiment of the British People and by every feeling of humanity; by a reversal, in fact, of a policy to which she is so fully committed that retrogression could only be attended with disgrace.”
Bunch, with careful political calculation, was taking the speech of Governor James Adams and the diatribes of Leonidas Spratt and turning them against the Southern slavers. “The remedy, I believe the only one, cannot fail to occur at once to Your Lordship, viz, the disentanglement of the English Manufactures from the thrall of the American Cotton-grower; the production of the raw material in some quarters of the Globe where it can be grown without the attendant horrors of Slavery. It is not for me to do more than to suggest the subject to Your Lordship, whose attention, I doubt not, has been already directed to it. But I venture to do so with the more earnestness that I believe the impending evil to be of great magnitude, and that, so far as my humble judgment goes, we have the cure in our own hands, thanks to the magnificent resources of Africa, of the East, and probably of the West Indies.”
Bunch signed Dispatch No. 10 knowing it might be slow to take effect in London if, indeed, it had any effect at all. But he returned to the theme often in the years that followed, writing with contempt about the catastrophe his Charleston acquaintances were bringing upon themselves and concern about the risks that they might pose to British interests. From 1857 onward, he hammered home the same point again and again, playing a role out of all proportion to his nominal position. But, then, that is what he had been looking to do all of his career.
When Bunch wrote his observations on the price of Negroes, he was using the same laws of supply and demand as those leading the pro-slave-trade crusade. But almost as Bunch wrote, supply and demand were giving way rapidly to speculation that defied economic reason and that would lend new urgency to the debate.
A financial panic in the fall of 1857 had devastating consequences for the industrial North, where so much capital was in factories and equities. To the extent that the South was affected, it was because of the decline in Northern markets, but by and large the South escaped the worst effects of the panic because its money was not in stocks and bonds. Its money was in land and slaves. “The peculiar institution,” according to one speculator among many, was “decidedly the most profitable and safe investment in the whole country.” There was a feverish desire to buy slaves to the limit of possible credit and in the spirit of speculation. This was a bubble market in human beings.
The majority of Southerners, however, were deeply uneasy with the idea of importing Africans en masse, even though De Bow, Yancey, Spratt, and Rhett worked overtime to convince them that doing so would be all for the good of the Negro, too. The strongest objections came from Virginia and Maryland, where much of the soil was worn out and it was understood that slave breeding and slave raising had become profitable industries for some of the masters. If the market were opened up to African imports, the value of those locally produced human assets would plunge. Pro-slave-trade crusaders countered that huge numbers of Africans were needed to revive old lands as well as to open new ones, increasing production and profits everywhere. For example, in factories, which the South so far had been slow to build, African slaves would be docile workers and wouldn’t threaten the status quo the way white laborers frequently did in the North. “The smoke of the steam engine should begin to float over the cotton fields, and the hum of spindles and the click of looms make music on all our mountain streams,” mused an editorialist in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Slaves became so valuable that nobody could afford to let them go, and the cherished notion among genteel planters that they would try to keep slave families together rather than auction off members separately became mere pretense. As a matter of economic self-preservation, emancipation was unthinkable for the South’s elites. If slavery were abolished, they’d be bankrupt, pure and simple. A large slave owner and man of fortune spoke “with all the fervor of a capitalist menaced by a set of Red Republicans,” wrote one British reporter touring the South. (Jefferson Davis would later say bluntly that the slave-owning states would secede “to save ourselves from a revolution” that threatened to make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless.”)
With prices so high for legal slaves, the temptation to import illegal ones from Africa finally was more than some planters could resist, and, thanks to the Cuban traffic, the infrastructure for the revival of the trade already was in place. Ships with oversize water tanks, special hidden decks, cages, and shackles, many of them outfitted in New York, operated extensively between West Africa and the West Indies.
In his Dispatch No. 10, Bunch had warned that the Crown would find itself in an untenable situation if the South seceded and reopened the slave trade with Africa, and he had recommended that other sources of cotton be opened, exploited, and developed by Great Britain. This was not a new idea. Indeed, the British search for alternative supplies of cotton had been at the center of Governor Adams’s bizarre oration. It had been talked about in the British government, in British journals, and also in American ones for many years. But it was hard for the merchants and factory owners of Lancashire to break free from their addiction to the cotton produced by the slave-owning Southern market. The prices were attractive, the networks were well established and highly profitable, and nobody wanted to turn his back on a good return. So Bunch had made the case, in the coolest language possible, that the moral dilemma posed by the renewal of the African slave trade would soon be trumped by the convenience of commerce with the South.
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IN WASHINGTON, D.C., a new minister, Lord Napier, arrived from London. He was about the same age as Bunch but had all the natural advantages of money and political connections in Britain that Bunch had to spend so much time cobbling together. Napier’s father, an old friend of Palmerston, had died trying to open up China to British trade in the 1830s, and the young Napier had been under Palmerston’s wing ever since. Even from the United States he felt comfortable giving the Foreign Office his own opinions about dealing with the Chinese and the latest British military campaign fighting its way toward Peking.
Napier was considered quite handsome, with long hair and bedroom eyes and a manner at once so casual and enthusiastic that his innate arrogance was seen as good humor. Women loved him, and influential senators—most notably William Seward—became great fans. But Lord Clarendon was not overjoyed with his reporting. From London’s perspective, Napier seemed to have fallen in line very quickly with the American view of Manifest Destiny in Central America. Certainly he downplayed concerns about the slave trade to Cuba (“I think the account of the profits realized in the traffic, as estimated by the British Authorities in Cuba, must be overrated”), but Clarendon believed his men in Havana and Charleston. Only months after the elegant young minister had taken over the Washington legation, Clarendon named a second envoy to deal with the whole Central America mess.
In the months after Clarendon received Bunch’s Dispatch No. 10—and also dispatchers from other consuls informing him that the slave trade to Cuba conducted under the U.S. flag was burgeoning—the Foreign Secretary kept insisting that Napier follow up on the matter. Napier responded dutifully: “Your Lordship’s wishes about the slave trade shall be attended to.” But they rarely were.
American politicians playing on rampant jingoism had turned the issue into a matter of national sovereignty: it wasn’t really about slaves; it was about the question of whether the Royal Navy should be allowed to search American ships. Even Northerners such as Seward jumped on the bandwagon, raving against England and shrieking for war at the slightest hint of a provocation. American naval vessels in the Africa Squadron of the United States, which were supposed to be capturing slavers, actually spent much of their time trying to prevent the British from interfering with any ships that flew the Stars and Stripes, even if those vessels stank of the slave trade. There were several standoffs at sea and episodes of hysteria in the press and in Congress.
It wasn’t until a year after Bunch had sent his Dispatch No. 10 that Napier paid a visit to the office of the cosmopolitan senator from Louisiana, Judah P. Benjamin, a wealthy litigator famous for his soft manner and enigmatic smile, to ask his views on the slave trade. One of the ploys being used by politicians in the Louisiana legislature to get around Federal laws against trafficking Africans was to legalize the importation of “apprentices,” who would be, no one doubted, slaves in all but name. But Benjamin reassured Napier that even if the “apprentice” measure passed in Louisiana, it would be crushed in Congress. “The whole North will rise against the revival of the Trade under any disguise,” said Benjamin, “and the middle and Western slave states would take the same side to preserve the value of their breeding Negroes and maintain the Union.”
Napier was only mildly relieved by this prediction. It had taken him a while, but he had begun to reach the same conclusions that Bunch had reached the year before about the inevitable reopening of the slave trade. And while Senator Benjamin might have been right about the current state of public feeling on the subject, it didn’t look as if that would last long. South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas claimed to be desperate for new cheap labor. “If they cannot get Negroes in the Union, they will break the Union and get Negroes as an independent federation,” Napier concluded. “I do not believe that the existing political structure can last long.”
The message to London finally was coming out of the legation in
Washington in the same register as it had come out of the consulate in Charleston, and even President James Buchanan had begun to see the threat posed by the slave-trade issue. He finally ordered American warships to crack down on the Cuba traffic that had been protected by the U.S. flag, and soon captured slavers were bringing to American shores the inhuman savagery of the Middle Passage for anyone to see, if anyone cared to look.