“OLD BUCK,” PRESIDENT BUCHANAN, decided to send a spy to the South. In the summer of 1859, after many months of news about the Wanderer affair, reports kept surfacing about Africans being smuggled ashore in different corners of the Republic. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois claimed there had been fifteen thousand of them landed in recent years. The British were concerned and angry. Buchanan hoped the capture of the Echo would show he meant to honor his government’s obligations to fight the African trade, but the outcome of the court case had been a disgrace. Buchanan’s secretary of state, Lewis Cass, told Lord Napier in Washington that the slave trade was discussed in the cabinet, that at least one steamer would be sent to the African coast for interdiction, and that “every effort would be made to substitute steam power for the present old-fashioned sailing vessels.” But if the secret slave trade between the Southern states and Africa really was as big as Senator Douglas said, then President Buchanan needed to know. And if it was not, he needed to be able to say so with real conviction. This was a domestic political issue now. The fire-eaters and their sympathizers had used the Wanderer expeditions to flout Federal law. Buchanan understood perfectly well that these heirs of nullification and partisans of disunion wanted to challenge the office of the president, the leadership of the Democratic Party, and him personally.
So in early September 1859, Buchanan’s secretary of the interior, Jacob Thompson, hired Benjamin F. Slocumb to travel through the South and see what he could find out. When the slow-talking Mississippian told folks he wanted to buy Africans, they believed him. He spoke with a drawl, and he might say he’d “heard tell these Africans was cheaper than home-bred stock.” He might say he was just curious and was always in the market for good workers. Whatever his technique, he’d coax out the information he needed.
Slocumb traveled from Washington down to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he saw no sign of Africans. Then he went on to Charleston, where he met with “a gentleman somewhat prominent as an advocate of the African slave trade.” Slocumb didn’t offer up a name in his subsequent report, but the man most likely to fit that description at that time of year would have been the ever-loquacious Leonidas Spratt. The source confided to Slocumb that all the reports of Africans landing on American shores were “mere fabrications,” apart from those about the Wanderer. The Spratt-like source also told Slocumb that a swindler from New York had been down to Charleston a few weeks earlier and nearly convinced people to put up money for African slaves to be landed at Beaufort, several miles south of the city. But the swindler had been found out and “given a cold bath.” Slocumb wrote that “there are doubtless men in Charleston, as in New York and Boston, ready to engage in the African slave trade, but they are few and are generally deterred from active operations by fear of incurring the penalties of the law.” Since the penalties were never imposed, it’s not clear why Buchanan’s spy thought they were so dissuasive.
Slocumb seems not to have heard about the Jehossee, a suspected slaver that had sailed from Charleston just before he got there. And probably he could not have known about the activities in Mobile of Captain Timothy Meaher, builder of the Southern Republic, who was just beginning to plot a voyage to Africa in the fall of 1859. In any case, Slocumb never mentioned them in his report, which left the impression with the Buchanan administration that the Wanderer was an isolated incident.
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ROBERT BUNCH WAS in New York when Buchanan’s spy passed through Charleston. From an estate called The Grange he kept filing his various dispatches directly to the Foreign Office and expecting direct responses, just as he’d been doing for most of the decade. Bunch missed the kind of personal praise and attention he’d gotten from Lord Clarendon. Lord Russell was a model of formality, but Bunch’s routine was pretty much the same. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
There was a new minister in Washington, Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, and he was in a cold rage. The senior diplomat found it utterly unacceptable that a mere consul, which is what he considered Bunch to be at the time, would presume to leave the minister in Washington out of the loop on any sensitive matter. And no question was as sensitive as slavery.
In the particular case that prompted Lyons’s fury, Bunch had asked for instructions from Lord John Russell about how to proceed in the case of a recent detention of two British citizens. Lyons had already written to Bunch twice about the case with instructions to hire legal counsel, but Bunch ignored him and wrote to Lord John Russell directly. Lyons told Bunch bluntly that this was “neither regular in point of form, nor courteous to me,” which Bunch understood was British understatement that cut as deep as a steel blade. Clearly the new minister was concerned about the reaction in the Foreign Office, not only on the part of Lord Russell, whom he did not know well, but on the part of men such as Under-Secretary Hammond, who could make or break an envoy they ceased to respect. They could nibble away at his budget. They could spread rumors and insinuations, whispering hints of contempt into the ears of the Foreign Secretary and even the Prime Minister. No, this sort of insubordination from a consul in South Carolina—who happened to be in New York!—simply would not do. Lyons called Bunch down so sharply, with both a letter and a telegram demanding immediate responses, that the consul was left sounding breathless even in his correspondence. Bunch wrote to Lyons that he was “deeply mortified at the rebuke,” the worst he could remember in eighteen years of official service.
It is not surprising that Lyons was sensitive. At the age of forty-two and unmarried, he had seen a lot of the world, but for many years it took little notice of him. Most of his younger life he lived in the shadow of his father, Admiral Edmund Lyons, a naval officer and diplomat who eventually rose to command the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet during the later stages of the Crimean War. When Richard Lyons was only twelve, he’d gone to sea as a midshipman on a forty-six-gun frigate under his father’s command. But unlike his hale and hearty younger brother, Edmund, who was his father’s favorite as well as his namesake, Richard was shy, not very athletic, and prone to seasickness. After a miserable time cruising the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in 1829, Richard eventually returned to land and took his degree at Oxford, then followed his father to the legation in Athens, where the elder Lyons, who had forged a close friendship with the Greek king, was the British envoy. When, later, the old man returned to active duty in the Royal Navy, Richard remained behind in Athens, languishing year after year until he became the oldest attaché in the service. Only when he threatened to quit altogether was he accredited to the Court of Tuscany with residence in Rome. And finally, in the tumult of Italian politics, Richard Lyons got a chance to show what he could do. He won the release of two Britons who’d been taken prisoner amid the revolutionary intrigues in southern Italy, and he found himself suddenly a star at London, regarded no longer as a lowly functionary but as a troubleshooter extraordinaire. In the resolutely class-conscious Foreign Office it probably helped, as well, that, with his father’s death in 1858, Richard succeeded to the peerage. As Lord Lyons, in the late spring of 1859 he replaced the out-of-step Napier in Washington.
President Buchanan was not pleased with the change. When Old Buck had been the American minister to the Court of St. James’s, he’d gotten acquainted with most of the leading politicians and diplomats in Great Britain, and he knew that, lord or no lord, Lyons was not one of them. Buchanan wanted “a first-rate man whose character is known to this country.” And a dispatch from the American legation in London only underscored the new envoy’s unimpressiveness. Lyons was “sensible,” it said, “unobtrusive,” and “short.” Lyons is supposed to have had such a horror of scenes that it was said (perhaps apocryphally) that he put up with the same breakfast every morning for many years rather than risk upsetting his valet.
But none of those self-effacing characteristics restrained Lyons’s anger at Bunch, and his insecurities probably heightened his ire. Lyons had spent his career immersed in European diplomacy, politics, and intrigues. He knew next to nothing about the United States. When he arrived in Washington, in a nation rapidly heading toward a war between North and South, he had never even heard of the Mason-Dixon Line, which demarcated the slave and free states. In what passed for social life in the grim village that was Washington, D.C., Napier had been a star. Lyons was a drudge. If, with his new title as minister, he couldn’t command the respect of the consul in Charleston—and if he let London see that—then this sudden upturn in his career could come to a quick and ignominious end.
Bunch knew all this, and he showed only grudging contrition. He had never been in the habit of communicating with the minister in Washington until after his work was done and reported directly to the Foreign Office, he told Lyons. He had conducted delicate negotiations; he had delivered sensitive diplomatic messages to the South Carolina governor; and although he informed the various ministers in Washington of these activities only after the fact, and privately, he had entertained very good relations with all of them. Or so he said.
Lyons noted drily that “the relations between the Consulates and this Mission appear to be very undefined and somewhat anomalous. I doubt whether the ordinary rules can be applied strictly in the U.S., where each separate state is in most respects independent of the Federal Government.”
Since Bunch was in New York that summer, as usual, Lyons decided it was time for a face-to-face meeting in Washington when Bunch headed back to Charleston. Lyons politely suggested “a short visit, at any time which best suited you,” and promised “I should have a room at your disposal.” Lyons said he didn’t want to inconvenience Bunch. Bunch said it was “no sort of inconvenience,” and he made arrangements to visit Washington at the end of the first week in November but not, in the end, without a little complaining. “The land journey is tiresome and troublesome,” he wrote, “especially when one is encumbered by children and servants, to say nothing of baggage.” He would leave Emma and Helen with friends in Baltimore and make the side trip to Washington himself, he said. But before the two men could meet, events began to overtake them.