MRS. BUNCH WAS OFFERING A post-convention tea at the residence, and her husband was upstairs, rushing, as usual, to send off several dispatches. She had invited a few of their friends from the better class of people in Charleston and some of the notables from the Democratic Party. Among them was the former U.S. attorney general Caleb Cushing, who had presided over the debacle. “I will try to get something out of him—i.e., if there be anything to get, which I doubt,” Mr. Bunch scrawled in a quick note to Lord Lyons. But the consul’s main concern that afternoon was to wrap up two formal reports to London. It was vital that the Foreign Office understand the implications of what was happening, and his dispatches were more urgent than ever.
The first, “Slave Trade No. 3,” looked at the judgment handed down in the trial of the detestable William C. Corrie, lobbyist and yachtsman, who’d presented himself as the owner of the yacht Wanderer in 1858. Federal judge A. G. Magrath had rewritten the law from the bench in a way that could set a precedent for the Union if it held together or, more likely, for whatever agglomeration of Southern states emerged from secession. Magrath’s “very novel view of the law” held “that the offense of carrying off and bringing to the United States a Negro or Mulatto, who had been a slave in Africa, does not amount to piracy under that law, which, in Judge Magrath’s opinion, is only applicable to the case of kidnapping, or bringing away by force, a Negro or Mulatto who was a free man when he was so kidnapped!” (Bunch could not resist the exclamation point, even in this formal communication.) Since nearly all the captives bought from the barracoons of West Africa already had been enslaved, this reasoning could open the door wide to the African trade as far as American, or at least Southern, courts were concerned.
Maybe Bunch was working too hard and too fast and still feeling sick, or maybe his quiet fury about Corrie and his disdain for the Democrats got the better of him, but his second dispatch that afternoon, written over the sound of teacups and saucers clinking and a soft hum of polite conversations, took a very strident turn. After duly sketching for Lord Russell the basic issues and the breakup of the Democratic Party, Bunch wrote a long concluding paragraph giving his opinion of what it all meant: The election of a Republican president probably would be a good thing for relations with Great Britain, since the Democratic Party, “which is by nature both insolent and aggressive” had never missed a chance to pick a fight with Britain. Her Majesty’s government had showed dignified restraint, “but I have never doubted that the time would come when we should be compelled to vindicate our honor by a war.”
Perhaps after the tea that afternoon, or maybe after he woke up the next morning—but in any case after there was no way to call the dispatches back—Bunch started to have some serious second thoughts about that last paragraph. Lord Russell was not Lord Lyons. Lord Russell was not Lord Clarendon. And Lord Russell was not the bellicose Lord Palmerston. Lord Russell was extremely interested in formalities and not very interested in the opinion of consuls. For Bunch to instruct Lord Russell on the vindication of British honor by means of war was the kind of mistake that could turn the Foreign Secretary against him and stop the Foreign Office from paying any attention at all. And if Lyons got the idea that Bunch was drawing attention to himself at Lyons’s expense, that could be the end of their vital alliance.
Desperately, Bunch shot off a scrawled note to Lyons saying he “earnestly” hoped Lyons agreed with him. Three days after that, as his unasked-for opinions about defending British honor were wending their way across the Atlantic, Bunch wrote to Lyons again with more second-guessing about that last dispatch. “I am sometimes afraid that I shall get the character at home of being a person too bitterly prejudiced against democratic institutions to render my opinion worth the taking. Mais, quoi faire?…How am I to praise, or even to hold my tongue, when everything around me is in direct opposition to all I love and respect?”
Bunch had spent a decade dissembling—biting his glove like the villain in a play, as he once put it. The job wasn’t getting any easier, and it was getting decidedly more dangerous in a land of lynch law and assassins. The vigilantes, the guards, the informers, the detectives—all continued to multiply. Bunch should have encrypted his message, but he had grown annoyed with the laborious process. He had wanted to express himself clearly, passionately, and he couldn’t do that in code. Blocks of four Greek characters were barely adequate for conveying basic facts, let alone intense emotions. But what if those unencrypted letters were intercepted? He knew from his friend Postmaster Alfred Huger just how insecure the mails could be.
Bunch’s family had become a worry, too. His sister-in-law Helen, apparently confident she was invulnerable as the wife of Daniel Blake, as the mistress of Board House and The Meadows plantations, and as the pious founder of a church in the up-country attended by the finest people from Charleston and Savannah, made no secret of her Union sympathy. Inevitably that reflected on her sister, Emma, and on Bunch, as well. And then there was little Helen, their daughter. She was five years old, just the age when bits of conversation overheard in private may be repeated by a child without guile and without malice but with hugely embarrassing consequences.
If any of those men at Bunch’s club drinking “Death to the Union” and blood and thunder generally knew how bitterly he opposed the expansion of slavery, if any of the men and women invited to his wife’s tea had any inkling that he believed a Republican victory desirable and had so advised his government, these were the kinds of things that could make life unbearable in Charleston. This was not 1852, when George Mathew had been snubbed for his offenses. These days people were shot. And at the same time Bunch had to ask himself what recompense he got for his analysis and his opinion and his years of service in this place. If Lyons were offended, if Russell were incensed, Bunch would be all alone trying to protect himself and his family from the dangers closing in upon them.