“TODAY IS TO DECIDE THE question of Lincoln or no Lincoln,” Robert Bunch wrote to Lord Lyons on November 6, Election Day, 1860. The Charleston consul was still in New York, perhaps fearful, as he said, of the fevers that continued to rage along the South Carolina coast, perhaps fearful of the fever in the minds of the men there, or, maybe, just tired of the predictable insanity of it all. “My people are stark staring mad, and in the present temper I should be surprised at nothing they might do,” he said. But if anyone knew what was coming, Bunch did.
The results of the election reached Charleston four days after the vote. People poured out of their homes and offices clamoring for immediate secession, calling for the creation of a great Southern Confederacy. A huge red flag waved above Broad Street with a yellow palmetto on it, the symbol of South Carolina, and a lone star, for independence. Judge A. G. Magrath, who had handed down the infamous decisions in the Wanderer case and the Brothers case, declared that the Federal court over which he presided could no longer sit, because the Federal government no longer had jurisdiction in his country.
Bunch did not think there would be a lot of challenges to British interests at first. Quite the contrary: “I suppose the line will be for the South to love us very much.” Even so, he suggested, somewhat to Lyons’s dismay, that “it might be well for us to have a ship of war, of small draught of water, in our neighborhood during these troubles.” If South Carolina tried to impose new duties or other restrictions on British vessels, that would be an issue for Her Majesty’s government, and, “I should be greatly aided by the presence of one of H.M.’s ships.” He might also have been thinking of his personal safety.
By the time Bunch wrote directly to Lord Russell in London on November 10, Charleston was thoroughly inflamed with rebellious sentiment. “A state of things has arisen since the election of Mr. Lincoln very nearly akin to a Revolution,” Bunch said, probably knowing how little Russell liked that word. Bunch hoped South Carolina would at least wait until the Republicans committed some outright act of aggression “before it commits itself to a course which cannot fail to result in its humiliation and disgrace,” but he thought it just as likely that the state would provoke the Federal government and leave it with no choice but to respond with force. “The violent agitation which has prevailed throughout the State of South Carolina during the last fortnight,” wrote Bunch, “seems to increase day by day in intensity.” In South Carolina and Georgia hundreds volunteered to be “Minute Men,” ready, like the legendary militias of the American Revolution, to fight at a moment’s notice. Mobs descended on anyone accused of “uttering abolition sentiments.” Edmund Ruffin, Virginia’s grand old man of secession, arrived in Charleston to celebrate. Leonidas Spratt, irrepressible, addressed a crowd of hundreds at the Charleston Hotel.
A couple of days later Bunch followed up with another “brief summary” to Lord Russell about “the feeling of hatred to the North, which has been steadily growing ever since it became evident that the rule and power of the South were rapidly vanishing before the superior population, wealth, industry, and enlightenment of the Free States.”
The people of South Carolina and other slave states, Bunch said, had convinced themselves that their very lives were at risk if they remained part of the Union. Many would acknowledge that Lincoln’s election was fair, but with their fears of “servile insurrection” constantly fanned by what they read of William Seward and other Republicans, “they contend that the question is no longer [of] one’s logic, but of existence, and that the instinct of self-preservation renders it impossible for them to recognize a Ruler whom they believe to be pledged to their destruction.” Bunch understood their concerns and wanted to make sure Lord Russell did, as well. But just as soon as Bunch was back on the ground in South Carolina, he continued using the issue of slavery and the slave trade to undermine the Southerners’ cause.
The outgoing governor of South Carolina, William H. Gist, sent a message to the legislature as it began its session in late November that gave Bunch a perfect chance to illustrate the sentiments that prevailed. He dissected the address word by word. Gist talked about encouraging direct trade with Britain and Europe, cutting New York out of the picture. But that was “nothing particularly new,” and there was no mention of where the “enterprise and capital” might come from to make that happen. Bunch knew there wasn’t any. Gist wanted to roll back even those very limited rights that black men and women might hope for. In Charleston, particularly, free blacks worked in small commerce and in crafts, and slaves often were hired out by their masters to do skilled labor—or they earned their own money and paid their masters a share. Gist wanted to do away with all that, in a “system of slavery,” Bunch wrote, that was meant “to keep the man of color, for all time and to all purposes, as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, without rights as a human being and without the power of raising himself in the social scale by ability, industry, or good conduct.” The threat and the promise of secession were bringing out all that was worst in Southern thinking.
Then there was the matter of the Federal forts in Charleston Harbor, Moultrie and Sumter, which Gist said would have to be surrendered by the Federal government, even as he called on the people of South Carolina to take up arms. Bunch underlined several passages in red pencil, including one toward the end of the message, where Gist said that if the forts were not surrendered, it would mean a fight to the death. Hyperbole was helping to drive the country toward war, and Gist gave a fine example of it. South Carolina, he said, would “infinitely prefer annihilation to disgrace.”
Bunch’s final word on Gist’s message: “I have no hesitation in saying that, in the present excited condition of the public mind, an opportunity for the shedding of blood would be eagerly welcomed.”
What Bunch did not say, but certainly knew, is that he was always just one discovered dispatch away from the risk that the blood shed would be his. Long ago Crampton had thought the mails were not secure enough to get a dispatch to William Mure in New Orleans. And though Bunch could take some comfort in the security of the diplomatic pouch, he could never be sure of the lengths to which his paranoid neighbors might go as war drew nearer. Over the years Bunch had known of white men beaten, tarred and feathered, and ridden on rails. He had written dispatches about all that. Now the public mood was still more dangerous. The mob was looking for people to hate, and there was no hatred as intense as what the mob felt when it felt betrayed.
Bunch had never set out to portray himself as a brave man, and probably he was not. He never had been or tried to be a soldier. The greatest risks he took as part of his consular duties through most of the Charleston years had been the rescue now and then of a black British subject unfairly thrown into one of the prisons of the Carolinas. He had guarded his tongue as best he could, and he had built a life of relative creature comfort by ignoring in public and even among his in-laws the abuses of a system he attacked constantly in his official dispatches and private and confidential letters. But in a society whose leaders talked of preferring annihilation to disgrace—annihilation, what a word!—the madness he had half-joked about in the past truly had taken over. Irony could no longer protect Robert Bunch from what lay ahead.