CONSUL BUNCH HAD GOTTEN his first wish. When the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales toured North America in the late summer of 1860, Lord Lyons accompanied him, and Robert Bunch accompanied Lord Lyons as his private secretary (although not part of the official entourage). And Bunch had gotten his second wish, as well. The prince would not be coming to South Carolina.
The royal party traveled through Canada, where the reception was rapturous, which was to be expected. And then they crossed into the United States at Detroit, where the reception was, if anything, even more enthusiastic. And that was a bit of a surprise. But this was the American way—to love the “lion” of the moment—and this adolescent nicknamed “Bertie” certainly qualified as a star in the eyes of the American public. If the trip continued to go well, Lyons and Bunch hoped it might smooth the very rough relations between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Lyons had been assigned the task of stage-managing the whole show, and he came up with the novel idea that Edward Albert should be known during his American sojourn as “Baron Renfrew,” one of the heir apparent’s lesser titles, as if that would enable him and his retinue to travel incognito. But the Renfrew ruse soon became something of a joke. Journalists followed the royal ramblings everywhere. There was no press secretary on the trip, but Bunch was just the kind of person reporters might turn to for bits of information and insights. The journalists soon exhausted their metaphors for the “seas” and “torrents” and “throngs” and “hives” of Americans who turned out to cheer the prince. Editorialists, trying to strike a more sober tone, called the tour and the public reaction across the North a sign of the mutual respect the two countries now had for each other. In fact, it was more a matter of romance than respect. But so far, so good.
The problem, as Bunch had cautioned, was the South. No part of the country felt a greater romantic attachment to British royalty. Bertie might not have been much to look at, but for the self-styled cavaliers of Virginia and the aristocrats of the Carolinas, he embodied the heritage of chivalry to which they aspired. That Bertie’s father had campaigned against slavery and the slave trade, that the British Crown colony of Canada was refuge to thousands of runaway slaves—none of that really mattered to Southerners who’d grown up reading Sir Walter Scott and hoped to get a glimpse of real British royalty.
But, of course, the issue of slavery mattered quite a bit to Lyons and Bunch, as well as to many others in the prince’s party, and the original agenda that Lyons laid out for “Baron Renfrew” did not include a single Southern state. The official reason for snubbing Dixie was, as Bunch suggested, concern about the health of the heir apparent. But the bigger problem, of course, was preventing any hint that by visiting the South, Wales was approving its peculiar institution.
Only at the last minute, under considerable pressure from the Federal government in Washington, did Lyons add an overnight trip to Richmond, Virginia. Many of the traveling press did not make the journey and relied on secondhand, anonymous accounts from those few who were there. The picture was not a pretty one, and the spin (perhaps by Bunch) was entirely negative. In Richmond, it seemed, the locals were offensive. The sheets on the prince’s bed supposedly were dirtied before he arrived by rubes fondling the fine fabric. Protocols and etiquette were ignored, and a mob jostled the monarch-to-be so badly at one appearance that he had to leave by a back door. The British press picked up on the “rudeness” in Richmond, contrasting it repeatedly with the warm and respectful reception everywhere else, which was to say, in the North. Later, the Richmond Times-Dispatch refuted the accusations one by one, but in London the unsavoryimpression of Southern behavior remained.
The way the prince snubbed Dixie might have been taken as a sign of British reticence. But secession fever was growing in the South and, with it, wildly unrealistic notions of its ties to the Old Country. By then, Southerners were not inclined to heed any omen that did not justify their belief that Britain would back their bid for independence.
A few months earlier, in February, Consul Bunch was an honored guest at the Charleston Jockey Club’s annual dinner, the culmination of Race Week. Amid all the pronouncements about equine bloodlines and gentlemanly bonhomie, Bunch was, of course, called on to make a toast.
“I think we are all familiar with the encouragement Her Majesty gives to the Turf at home and abroad,” he said. “At home, we have the Queen’s Plates and Cups. Her Majesty attends Ascot, and during that week her hospitality at Windsor is well known. Abroad, the Queen has given Plates to be run for in two colonies at least, Canada and Australia, and, gentlemen, without intending to be unkind, or to taunt you with your misfortunes, I cannot help calling your attention to the great loss you yourselves have suffered by ceasing to be a Colonial dependency of Great Britain, as I am sure that if you had continued to be so, the Queen would have had great pleasure in sending you some Plates, too.”
Bunch was just joking, trying “to raise a laugh after dinner,” as he put it. But to his amazement, the men of the Jockey Club, some of the richest and most influential in the state and in the country, took him at his word. The applause was long and loud. “After I had finished,” he informed Lyons, “several members came to congratulate me, declaring that I was quite right in condoling with them upon their loss, that they were great fools for ever leaving Great Britain, and proposing that the Queen should be requested to ‘annex the South.’ ”
All this happened after dinner over brandy, Bunch told Lyons, but “it was ten minutes after dinner,” so nobody was that drunk, “and several people have today alluded to the subject and declared that they should consider, if not annexation, at any rate, a close alliance with Great Britain, and a remodeling of their democratic form of government, the greatest of blessings.
“The fact is that this community, at least, is thoroughly disgusted with the present state of affairs and would go to very great lengths to remedy them.”
Many in the South were convinced that their economic bonds to Britain would trump all other questions, and Bunch often reminded London of that delusion. As he informed Lord Russell, the Southerners “count upon three things: Cotton, Slave Labor, and Free Trade.” They were convinced that the first could be produced nowhere else in the world as well as in the South, and that slaves were essential to do that. Cotton, they thought, would “secure to them not only immediate recognition from abroad, but even an armed intervention in their behalf” if the U.S. government decided to fight at all. Free trade would then make the South a more intimate partner of Britain than of the Northern United States, or so they believed.
Senators were wearing pistols on the floor of Congress that summer, flushed with the wet heat of Washington and a pervasive sense that the great duel was about to begin. The hysteria created by John Brown still raged throughout the slaveholding states almost a year after the raid itself. (The acting British consul in Mobile seemed to think a full-fledged rebellion was under way deep in the heart of Alabama.) But the investigation into Brown’s conspiracy had come to seem almost irrelevant, and likely counterproductive, in the face of the coming war. Jefferson Davis had convened the investigating commission saying, “I believe a conspiracy has been formed,” and that it reached across the Atlantic. But now he concluded that Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry was “simply the act of lawless ruffians.” The wiser Southerners understood that it wouldn’t do to antagonize the Crown in the months to come.
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WHEN THE PRINCE of Wales arrived in New York City on October 11, he received, according to a correspondent for the London Times, “such an ovation as has seldom been offered to any monarch in ancient or modern times.” “Renfrew” and his party had traveled across New Jersey by train, and at Perth Amboy they boarded the revenue cutter Harriet Lane, named after the bachelor President Buchanan’s niece and hostess, for the final leg of their journey to what, even then, was called the “Empire City.” Gen. Winfield Scott, the great hero of the Mexican War and the commander of the U.S. Army, received them. New York dignitaries crowded the deck. Lord Lyons hovered near the royal, while Bunch faded into the background and, one can surmise, spent some of his time talking to reporters.
Robert Bunch, who knew New York City well, had been worried from the first moment he heard of the planned visit. The Irish could be a particular problem, and as for the mayor and his cronies, they were “common scoundrels,” Bunch warned. He had watched the operations of the city’s rival political machines up close when he was deputy consul there. He was back in New York every year, surrounded by talk of Mayor Fernando Wood’s violence and corruption, which were extraordinary even by the standards of the time. Wood was a man not just of the street but of the gangs. His great supporters were the Dead Rabbits and others in the slums around Five Points. In 1857, rival police forces—the incredibly venal Municipals loyal to Wood, and the Metropolitans, more or less loyal to his Republican rivals—fought pitched battles against each other while they let the infamous mobs run wild. “It would be taken as a very poor compliment were the Prince turned over to the civilities of such a set of blackguards as the New York City Fathers are,” said Bunch.
Bunch’s reservations about the likely scene in New York City were echoed in several American papers, including the New York Herald, and were duly picked up by the British press to such an extent that the correspondent of the LondonTimes eventually complained about the “constant succession of coarse articles” that depicted New Yorkers as “little better than a horde of savages” and conjured visions of the prince in an open coach “tossed like a little boat upon the surges of a violent, irrepressible, rough, half-drunken mob, all trying to shake hands with him and clamber into the carriage at once.”
But now, here was the prince, and here was Bunch, and here were many unsavory city fathers, and all were slowly but steadily approaching Manhattan. As soon as the Harriet Lane left the docks in New Jersey, the royal party sat down to an opulent luncheon of oyster soup, meat and game dishes cooked with a great deal of lard and truffles, plus a variety of meringues, charlottes, and cakes for dessert. There were also ample libations, and the young prince was keeping pace with the best of them. An English reporter writing for the New York World thought he looked “decidedly rickety—shaky on the legs” but “didn’t put it in the paper, thinking doing so would be in bad taste.”
It was nearly two o’clock before the city came into view: a long, low, interminable mass of redbrick houses; the skyline was dominated in those days not by buildings but by the masts of the many tall ships in the harbor. As the steamer came into sight of the wharf, the guns from the shore batteries fired off a salute, shrouding the waterfront in clouds of white smoke. Slowly the prince and his party aboard the ship began to make out the dense swarms of people on the shore: they were on the tops of walls and peering out of windows, climbing up the masts and yardarms of the ships, clinging to the branches of trees, all seemingly in motion, waving hats and handkerchiefs, cheering and clapping, creating what one correspondent remembered as a “hoarse, undulating roar” as they greeted the British royal. Flags and banners were strung above the road, handkerchiefs fluttered like a vast fringe above the crowd, and hats flew into the air amid shouts of “Welcome to New York!” and, yes, “God save the Queen!”
The slave traders of New York, whose offices were only a few blocks away from the prince’s parade up Broadway, did not stop their business for the royal reception. That same week a notorious broker of slave ships for the Cuba trade, John A. Machado, sent a bark called the Mary Francis on its way to Africa. And on October 10, 1860, the day before the prince sailed from Perth Amboy to Manhattan, the American gunship San Jacinto went after the hermaphrodite brigBonitaoff the west coast of Africa in what became the “longest successful chase of a laden slaver ever made by an American cruiser.” The Bonita, like the Wanderer and the Clot ilda, was relatively small and very fast, but she was heavy with 622 Africans crammed on board. After more than three hours, the San Jacinto steamed close enough to fire warning shots just behind the Bonita’s stern, and she came around. The mostly Spanish crew went on board the San Jacintoand were sent for trial to New York.
But all the slave-trade news breaking with metronomic regularity in the pages of the New York Times and forwarded punctually to the Slave Trade Department did nothing to diminish the excitement around the royal spectacle.
It wasn’t the disaster that Bunch had expected, but, then, neither was the bonhomie meant to last.
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IN ALBANY A few days later, William Seward was probably drunk at the dinner for the Prince of Wales and his entourage. He’d been out campaigning in Michigan—campaigning for Lincoln, which wasn’t easy for a proud, defeated man like Seward. He’d smoke his cigars and drink his whiskey, and he’d do his gunslinger stance on stage, his hands deep in his pockets. “Are you in earnest?” He’d soak up the applause like a dog being stroked. And then he’d tell his listeners what he believed and what they wanted to believe. At one point Seward said that, sure enough, Canada would be part of the United States one day. He’d said such things before, but this was not, certainly, the wisest thing to be quoted saying when you are about to have dinner with the Prince of Wales and his party. When Seward arrived at the home of New York governor Edward Morgan that October evening, everyone there had read his remark, and the air was thick with suspicion. Not a good time for another drink, but probably, for Seward, an irrepressible time.
Seward spied the Duke of Newcastle, a former Secretary of War, who was hard not to recognize with his full red beard and face redder still. They’d met the year before on Seward’s goodwill European tour and had had a perfectly civil conversation. But, of course, then everyone had thought Seward would be the next president. Even so, Seward figured he knew these people. He had met Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. He had been received at the homes of Lord Russell and Lord Palmerston. He knew their inclinations and their concerns, and he understood that they would not want to intervene in an American war on the side of slavery, although some of them—Seward had no doubt about it—might hope the Union would break apart quietly. This, Seward assured Newcastle, would not be the case. The Union would fight secession, and, moreover, if it had to, it would fight any power that supported secession.
William Seward, as he had done so often before, seemed to play with the notion of war as if it were a parlor game, as if Britain could be insulted publicly and then he could just wink and nod and turn away. A flabbergasted, furious Newcastle remembered Seward telling him that “he would make use of insults to England to secure his position in the States, and that I must not suppose that he meant war. On the contrary, he did not wish war with England, and he was confident we should not go to war with the States.”
This war-no-war game of Seward’s by this time was all too familiar territory to British diplomats and consuls. Maybe after a decade of threatened conflagrations over Central America, over recruiting soldiers for the Crimea, over that pig on San Juan Island, and, yes, over supposed British insults to the American flags that, in fact, protected notorious slave ships, the rabble-rousers really did think they could threaten war against the greatest naval power on earth with impunity. But they were striking poses very close to the edge of an abyss. Palmerston would not want to support the slave-owning South, yet if he was goaded too often by Yankee truculence, he might very well turn on the North, and the Union would be finished. That was one reason Bunch, helped by Lyons, kept up the steady drumbeat of reports about the pro-slave-trade crusade of Spratt and Rhett and others. The fire-eaters’ insistence on reopening the commerce in human beings straight from Africa would stick in Palmerston’s craw and perhaps make him pause before lashing out at a Northern incendiary such as Seward.
In any case, at the precise moment of the Prince of Wales’s visit in 1860, during that dinner in Albany on the last leg of Bertie’s happy sojourn in North America, war between the United States and Britain seemed a remote possibility. Nobody but Seward appeared to be thinking about it, just then, much less talking about it. To use such language at a dinner for the prince was highly inappropriate. But Seward, it seemed, just could not help himself, and that did not bode well.