AS HER MAJESTY’S CONSUL SAW Rhett to the door, Charleston was running on pure adrenaline. Secession was inevitable, and maybe war, although many hoped the confrontation would not come to that. But teetering on the edge of the unknown left people with the sensation that anything could happen at any moment. Bunch’s friend, the old lawyer James Petigru, who seemed to be the last unrepentant Unionist in the state, called the legislature in Columbia an asylum “full of lunatics.”
One evening Bunch followed a military band parading through the streets and saw it stop at the house of a young lawyer he considered a friend. The band struck up a tune and demanded the attorney come out and give a speech. “The amount of balderdash and rubbish which he evacuated about mounting the deadly breach, falling back into the arms of his comrades, and going off generally in a blaze of melodramatic fireworks, really made me so unhappy that I lost my night’s rest,” Bunch wrote in a private note.
In their moments of exaltation the secessionists saw themselves reliving the legendary American Revolution, when the colonies separated themselves from British tyranny. Apparently oblivious to the reaction of the allies they now needed badly, they reinstated “Evacuation Day,” commemorating the date, December 14, when the British military had pulled out of Charleston seventy-eight years before. “The tea has been thrown overboard,” exulted none other than Robert Barnwell Rhett; “The revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”
All the while fear ran through the streets alongside triumphalism, especially the enduring fear of a “servile insurrection.” Every black in Charleston came under suspicion, including the mulattoes, who’d enjoyed special standing, and free tradesmen, who now had to produce proof they were not slaves or risk becoming ones. Federal forts at the entrance to the harbor—Johnson, Moultrie, and Sumter—loomed through the winter mists like specters of war. They must surrender, it was said, it was stated, it was shouted. A rumor started that the regular mail steamer from New York would bring six hundred Federal troops to shore up the bastions of Union authority. The news spread like wildfire, and volunteers scrambled to the port to load a few old guns onto a merchant ship. They figured they’d sail to the mouth of the harbor and stop the mail steamer there so it couldn’t land any troops.
“Fortunately,” Bunch wrote to Russell, “someone had sufficient sense to telegraph to the North for information.” The rumor was nothing more than that. But if the story had been true, and if the Carolinians had tried to execute their impetuous plan, there wasn’t much question that a war would have begun, no matter how much President Buchanan wanted to avoid one as he waited, with fearful impatience, for the end of his responsibilities. “I am disposed to contemplateany event as possible,” said Bunch.
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IN THE FOG before war, as Consul Bunch gathered intelligence, he looked to his most reliable sources for the kind of information that would help him feel his way forward. And among his many contacts in Charleston, he thought of the lawyer and historian William Henry Trescot as particularly interesting and, indeed, as a friend, even though he knew him to be a calculating secessionist. Trescot’s arguments were meticulously reasoned and well informed; he was extraordinarily well connected; and this little man with intense, bright eyes was roaring good company. Mary Chesnut, wife of the senator, and private chronicler of the dawning Confederacy, loved to be scandalized by him. “I do not write to Trescot because he was too ‘Frenchy’ in some of his anecdotes to me,” she told her diary.
Charleston was full of narrow-gauge ideologues like Rhett, but Trescot had one of the keenest minds in the country; he was the perfect exemplar of that very rare specimen, a true son of the South who truly was a man of the world. He was both a theorist and a practitioner of what later came to be called realpolitik. Trescot published two important histories about American diplomacy that were of special interest to those few Britons who read them. His interest was in the story of how diplomats might shape the fate of a nation or help create a new one altogether, as they’d done when they broke away from the Crown in the American Revolution and then shored up the structure of the young Republic. Armed and bloody confrontations were part of the process, and there was no use denying it. “No nation has ever yet matured its political growth without the stern and scarring experience of civil war,” Trescot wrote in 1850. He did not see the United States of America as some divine invention, the self-acclaimed City on a Hill. He saw it as an experiment that had run its course, exhausted its potential. “It has achieved its destiny,” wrote the secessionist intellectual, “let us achieve ours.”
Yet a decade later, on the eve of the stern and scarring American Civil War, and as if out of the blue, Trescot suddenly was summoned to Washington to be second-in-command at the U.S. State Department.
The choice, on its face, was very strange. Secretary of State Lewis Cass was an ardent Unionist, ready to fight to hold the country together; Trescot was a fundamental believer in secession, ready to use any means at his disposal, especially diplomatic means, to take the country apart. But Cass was in his seventies. He was feeble, bloated, weary, and he was no favorite of Buchanan’s.
Trescot wrote after the war that he did not know Buchanan or Cass personally at all, although he did have some “slight” familiarity with the power broker John Slidell. He claimed he got the appointment as assistant secretary of state because of the histories he’d written and his brief tenure in the American legation in London, but that was unlikely. Slidell and Buchanan wanted a go-between to help them deal with South Carolina, one way or the other. There was a Georgian in the cabinet, Buchanan’s very close friend Howell Cobb at Treasury, and a Virginian, Secretary of War John B. Floyd. Slidell, the power behind Buchanan’s throne, could speak for Louisiana. But South Carolina was at the incendiary core of secession, and Buchanan wanted a direct line of communication. So, almost as soon as Trescot arrived in Washington in June, Buchanan made him acting secretary of state, and quickly brought him into his inner circle. Trescot then kept South Carolina’s secessionists—and Robert Bunch—informed with his particular views of what went on in Buchanan’s confused and divided cabinet.
On December 7, 1860, Trescot passed through Charleston for a few hours on his way from Columbia, where he’d been meeting with state officials, to Washington, where he was still a de facto member of the cabinet despite impending secession. While waiting for the steamer to take him north, he briefed Bunch on what was happening in both the state capital and the nation’s capital. In Washington, Secretary of War Floyd “thought secession unwise and dissolution unnecessary.” Floyd believed “the Black Republican triumph only temporary and that their success would be their destruction.” But Floyd sympathized with the right of states to secede and agreed that they’d been provoked by the North. Buchanan himself agreed with Floyd that the Republicans had won a victory bigger than they could handle, but he didn’t believe the South really wanted to divide the country, and he figured South Carolina would be left on its own. Based on this assumption, Buchanan had issued a long statement on December 3 in which he said, essentially, that he would not use force to hold the Union together. Trescot, who had spent the last six months working in close collaboration with Buchanan, told his friend Bunch—his friend the Queen’s consul—that the president’s address should be understood by other nations as “an official notification that the Union was dissolved and they might recognize [this] as soon as they pleased.”
Trescot was playing Bunch, and Bunch listened patiently, weighing every word. He and Trescot had known each other for a long time. Trescot told Bunch that in his pocket he had his formal appointment as the commissioner of South Carolina to Washington who would bear official notification of secession, but he expected something more than that. Trescot told Bunch confidentially, of course, that he was considering a position as South Carolina’s commissioner to England but that he was not interested in representing just one state and having Lord John Russell laugh at him. He wanted to go representing the whole Southern Confederacy.
Bunch let Trescot know he was impressed. Then he told him about his meeting with Rhett and, especially, their conversation about the revival of the African slave trade. Trescot said flatly that he thought “no Southern Confederacy would venture to propose its renewal.” Trescot was playing him again.