FOR A FEW WEEKS, COVERAGE of the Echo case played across the pages of the Northern and the Southern press. Senator William Seward, exploiting the moment, called for ten new war steamers to be commissioned for patrol duty on the African and American coasts to suppress the outrageous traffic being conducted under the American flag. But advocates of the slave trade claimed that the arrest of the Echo’s crew was an affront to their beloved South and her institutions—what one Mississippi paper called “the assault of fanatical and unscrupulous enemies who are bent upon her destruction.”
Fear was, as always, a current beneath the tide of anger. The old security worries behind the Negro Seamen Act surged back into the public debate as concerns grew that the example of these Africans in the harbor might somehow inspire the long dreaded “servile insurrection.” A correspondent calling himself “Conservative” wrote to the Charleston Daily Courier that the city’s slaves were talking among themselves and wondering why the Africans were protected from slavery and whether they had “powerful friends.” Although Charleston’s slaves generally were docile, Conservative wrote, they might become “unsettled in their notions.” And the spectacle of the ship’s crew under arrest had had an especially dangerous impact. “On Saturday last, right through the public streets, handcuffed and followed by a rabble of Negroes, were fifteen white men marched, under a guard of officers, from the landing on the wharf to the jail…and that, too, with the knowledge (not only of those who followed, but of the sixteen thousand other Negroes of our population), that they were so manacled and so marched for the reason only that they have been engaged in the trade in slaves—a thing which isdone daily in our streets.”
Consul Bunch occasionally noted in his correspondence that the “better class” of people in Charleston, like Richard Yeadon at the Charleston Courier, opposed the slave trade. But Bunch believed, after almost five years in South Carolina, that the political momentum lay with the relentless minority manipulating a feckless majority. The fire-eaters pushed day after day to reopen the trade or, failing that, to use the issue as the critical wedge between North and South.
Bunch’s first reports on the Echo case at the end of August and in September were written from New York, but the dispatches were timely and accurate, thanks to telegraph communications with South Carolina. By September 14 Bunch was even guardedly optimistic about the way the Federal government had handled the case. President Buchanan had sent the U.S. Navy’s steam frigate Niagara, which had just won fame for laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, to take the captured Africans to Liberia. There, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, they were to be clothed, fed, and educated for one year. The captain and crew of the Echo were under arrest, and it looked as if they would be tried in Federal court in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, before the end of the year. “I feel much pleasure in directing Your Lordship’s attention to the evidence of respect for the Law,” Bunch wrote, meaning Federal law.
For the Africans themselves, however, there was no happy ending. By the time those who survived Fort Sumter reached Liberia, another seventy-one had died on board the Niagara. The American agent charged with caring for them was furious at what he had seen and wrote to a friend in Britain that the Christian nations of the world had to unite to stop the trade. “Some new mode must also be introduced for the trial of those found on the slavers,” he wrote, “probably by trying them at once and swinging them up to the yard-arm.”
Bunch was inclined to share that sentiment as it became obvious that South Carolina was not a place where justice could be had. The apparent American respect for the law that Bunch praised in September all but disappeared by late November, when the proceedings against the captain and crew of the Echo got under way. The whole affair had taken a “very remarkable” turn, Bunch reported in an official dispatch. The lead attorney for the defendants was none other than Leonidas Spratt, who “has made himself very conspicuous by his advocacy…of a revival of the Slave Trade.” And despite the overwhelming evidence against the captain and crew, the grand jury, in what Bunch called “a monstrous piece of absurdity,” refused to indict. In his confidential correspondence with London, Bunch was flabbergasted: “That the offense with which the men were charged was committed, and by them, no one professed for a moment to doubt. They were taken in the very act, and every witness was present who could affirm their guilt. There was, therefore, no loophole through which the grand jury could escape. And yet, such is the force of public sentiment, that they refused to allow a trial to take place.”
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JUST THREE DAYS after the abortive end of the Echo case, Bunch had another irresistible chance to show that forces were at work intent on reopening the slave trade, breaking apart the Union, or both. A slaver had been caught unloading hundreds of Africans on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. Bunch dashed off a letter to the Earl of Malmesbury, who had replaced Lord Clarendon as Foreign Secretary after a short-lived Conservative government was formed earlier in the year. Georgia was, to be sure, another consul’s territory, but such was the nature of this slave-trade case, said Bunch, that “I am, nevertheless, emboldened to offer a few remarks upon it.”
The Charleston consul was looking not only to further his own views but to undermine those of Edmund Molyneux, the Savannah consul, who had held that position since 1831. Molyneux had no aspirations as a diplomat. Like many British consuls at the time he did not get a salary, only reimbursement for a few expenses, and he used his position to further his personal business ventures. Molyneux, by the 1850s, had married a rich widow and was well established as part of Savannah’s elite. He moved easily among the self-appointed aristocracy in the Low Country, and during the summer he decamped to his estate in the North Carolina highlands among the Blakes, the de Choiseuls, and other gentry escaping the pestilential heat on the coast. Molyneux owned many slaves, and he quietly, consistently ignored the British government’s abolitionist sentiments as he bought and sold the humans who made up a large part of his fortune. As one might expect, Molyneux’s reporting on other slavers and slaveholders was, at best, passionless and perfunctory. So Robert Bunch, ever a mix of moralist and careerist, decided to step in.
“It appears to be almost beyond doubt,” he wrote to Lord Malmesbury, “that a Cargo of Africans has been landed within the last few days on the Coast of Georgia, from a Schooner called the Wanderer.” Bunch knew the boat. It was a fast, luxurious craft that sailed under the burgee of the New York Yacht Club, with lines similar to those of the America, which Bunch had spied on under construction when he was vice consul in New York years before. Her captain and his companions wore the club’s buttons, and the yacht “availed herself of the privileges and immunities accorded to vessels of her class to disarm suspicion and carry out the nefarious purposes of her reputed owner.”
The Wanderer ostensibly belonged to Captain William C. Corrie, but Bunch did not believe that was the case. Rumor had it that she belonged to “a notorious Slave Trader in Savannah.” (In fact, she was owned by Charles A. L. Lamar, one of that city’s most prominent young businessmen, who moved in very much the same circles as Molyneux.)
“It is not my intention,” said Bunch, “to report to Your Lordship the details of the supposed landing of these Africans, of their being carried past the very City of Savannah, of the lukewarm action of the United States’ Authorities, or of the horrors of the voyage, which caused, as I learn, the death of 101 Negroes out of 471. These particulars will, doubtless, be supplied by Her Majesty’s Consul at Savannah.” (Bunch was making sure that if such details went missing from Molyneux’s dispatches, London would know about it.) But Corrie, the man being billed as the Wanderer’s owner, represented almost everything Bunch hated in American life, and he could barely contain himself as he sketched a portrait of him for Malmesbury.
“Mr., or as he styles himself, Captain Corrie is a South Carolinian by birth; his father was a Scotchman, who earned a precarious livelihood in Charleston by mending the wheels of the rough plantation carts of the country.” The son had followed the Army of the United States as a sutler during the Seminole War in Florida in the 1830s but afterward settled down in Washington, “where his occupation has been what is called ‘lobbying,’ that is, bribing members of Congress to vote for the payment of pecuniary claims upon the government of the United States. His business appears to have prospered; indeed, there are several notorious instances of his success. His influence at the Capital is very great; I was assured not long ago by one of the Members from this State that he had more power than all the South Carolina Delegation put together. Personally, he is a vulgar, swaggering fellow, addicted to drink, habitually boasting of this power in Congress, and fond of specifying the exact sum for which each member is to be purchased.
“Such being his antecedents, I need hardly add that he is capable of Slave Trading or any other villainy.”
Bunch reported “with much regret” that in Charleston “the general feeling is one of delight” on hearing the news of the Wanderer’s voyage: “in the first place, at the outwitting of the United States’ authorities, and, in the second, at the success of this importation of fresh laborers into the Southern Country.” As Bunch saw it, the Americans, and especially the Southerners, had no respect for law. The grand jury’s refusal to indict the captain and crew of the Echo in Columbia a few days before had been proof of that. But there was more: “The Legislature of this State passed yesterday a joint resolution calling upon the President of the United States to abrogate the 8th Article of the Treaty of Washington, which stipulates an American Squadron on the Coast of Africa.” If the fire-eating Carolinians could not yet force an overturning of the slave-trade ban, they would do everything they could to weaken its enforcement.
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AFTER THE Wanderer offloaded its surviving cargo on Jekyll Island that night in December 1858, it did not take Federal officials long to catch up with the yacht and impound it. They also arrested the brains and money behind the operation, the Savannah businessman Charles A. L. Lamar, on a steamer transporting 170 of the Africans up the Savannah River. Under Federal statutes, the Wand erer’s crew might have been convicted of piracy and hanged, but they knew—as everybody knew—that they never really had much to fear from the courts.
Lamar, the thirty-four-year-old heir to a banking fortune, was a friend of Leonidas Spratt and Robert Barnwell Rhett and the other fire-eaters, and one of those who had grown tired of waiting for the repeal of laws against importing slaves from Africa. Lamar saw himself as an unassailable Southern aristocrat, and eventually he used the trial of his men to score political points against the Federal government. One evening he sprung the skipper of the ship from jail so the two of them could join friends for a night on the town, and when the government put the seized Wanderer on the auction block in Savannah, the young Georgian with a blazing red mustache showed up front and center, brandishing his gold-tipped cane, announcing to the crowd that the ship had been taken from him unjustly and that no one should bid against him. The Savannah jailer raised his hand and bid four thousand dollars. Lamar was furious. He bid four thousand and one. The terrified auctioneer hammered down the sale. Then, amid cheers from the crowd, Lamar punched the jailer and knocked him to the ground.
The courts eventually handed Lamar a minimal sentence for his escapade liberating the Wanderer’s skipper. But Lamar’s adventures had been about more than profiteering, after all. He knew the slave-trade issue could hasten the breakup of the whole United States, and he figured he was ready for that. “I can whip the Government any time they make the issue, unless they raise a few additional regiments.”
Bunch understood Lamar’s game only too well. All the British consuls were supposed to keep punctilious records about any activity connected with the transatlantic slave trade. But with the exception of Edward Mortimer Archibald in New York, none devoted so much time and attention to the reporting as Robert Bunch did, and none understood better or explained more carefully the issue’s implications for the future of the United States and its relations with the United Kingdom. At that moment, in any case, it was as if Bunch could see the future. The ferocious arrogance of the slavers would tear apart the Union and very likely destroy the South as well.
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IN JANUARY 1859, the British squadron off the African coast seized a ship called the Brothers. “She had an American Register on board and hoisted the American flag, and was fully equipped for the Slave Trade,” as Bunch notified the Foreign Office. The Royal Navy delivered the captain and crew of the Brothers to Charleston in January 1859 to be put on trial under U.S. law, but, again, the South Carolina grand jury refused to indict. Indeed, the court treated the Federal statutes as a joke. “At present the people of the State do not seem to see the facts in so serious a light,” Bunch wrote in one of his most prescient dispatches. “They are rather amused at the idea of embarrassing the Federal Government, and perhaps, in a lesser degree, of annoying Great Britain, but they will awake from their delusion to find the Democratic Party broken up and the whole power of the Country thrown into the hands of the ‘Republicans’….When this shall happen, the days of Slavery are numbered….The prestige and power of Slave holders will be gone, never to return.”
The Charleston consul would do what he could to make sure that that prestige and power were broken, at least in the minds of Britain’s leaders, but that job was growing more difficult.
Lord Palmerston was back as Prime Minister, but he had not brought Clarendon with him to the Foreign Office, and it was said that Queen Victoria herself was disappointed. “We would have felt so sure with Lord Clarendon,” she wrote. Bunch almost certainly shared that sentiment. In the Palmerston government that took office in June 1859, the post of Foreign Secretary went to former Prime Minister Lord John Russell, who kept his diplomats, and especially his consuls, at arm’s length.
Palmerston and Russell had been maneuvering around each other for many years. In 1845, when the diminutive Lord John succeeded Palmerston’s brother-in-law Lord Melbourne as head of the Whig Party and became Prime Minister, he and other Whig grandees tried to keep Palmerston out of the cabinet. Russell, at the time, was respected as the heir to a Whig lineage that dated back far into the previous century. His features were fine, his eyes kind, and his mouth generous. But he was not an inspiring figure. “Men might think Lord John taciturn, angular, abrupt, tenacious, and dogmatic,” wrote one biographer, who then hastened to add that, nonetheless, “it was impossible not to recognize his honesty, public spirit, pluck in the presence of difficulty, and high interpretation of the claims of public duty.” In fact, Russell and the other hereditary leaders of the Whigs were never a match for Palmerston. Again and again, even when declared politically extinct, the aged “Lord Cupid” would come roaring back onto the scene as, indeed, he had done once again that summer of 1859. Now Russell was essentially a Prime Minister in waiting, and that wait might be a long one.
Clarendon was not totally out of the picture. He played the part of the candid friend to Palmerston’s government behind the scenes, and he had an important family connection to one of the key members of the cabinet. Clarendon’s brilliant and beautiful sister, Maria Theresa, was married to the journalist and statesman Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who would serve in the new Palmerston government as Chancellor of the Exchequer and, at an absolutely critical moment, as Secretary of War.
But where Robert Bunch had the ear of the Foreign Secretary himself when Clarendon was in office and had managed to continue cordial communications with the relatively taciturn Earl of Malmesbury, now the Charleston consul found himself increasingly shunted off to the permanent bureaucrats of the Foreign Office, those quibblers over protocol and expense reports, such as Permanent Under-Secretary Edmund Hammond.
Bunch needed someone to talk to.