EARLY ON CHRISTMAS EVE AFTERNOON, Robert Bunch received an unexpected visitor. A Mr. Thomas Butler Gunn from the New-York Evening Post was arriving too late for the Secession Convention’s most dramatic act, but his editor, John Bigelow, had decided the story was too big to heed the warning of Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr. Gunn was taking his life in his hands, but he figured he’d have some added protection because he was, as many of his countrymen in America were inclined to say just then, “an Englishman thoroughly grateful for his British accent.” Before Gunn left New York, he even went to the British consul there, the efficient Edward Mortimer Archibald, to get what he called “a quasi-passport to the South,” and one of the first stops he made the day after he dropped his bags at the Charleston Hotel was down “on Meeting Street towards the Battery, the aristocratic end of it,” to have that document countersigned “gratis” by Her Majesty’s consul in South Carolina.
Bunch’s home office was “an exceedingly British-looking apartment,” Gunn wrote in his diary, “with portraits of the Queen, Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, sketches of noble heads, and a large engraving of the coronation.” About Bunch himself there was an air of inconspicuousness, even invisibility: he was “slim” and appeared “elderly,” although he was only forty at the time. Gunn could not have known, of course, how difficult the last seven years had been. He saw Bunch as a “neatly shaved man attired in gray, with a tendency to baldness.” When Gunn first entered, Bunch was “fussing about” trying to attach a little gilded version of the Prince of Wales crest, three feathers emerging from a coronet, above Bertie’s portrait. Bunch said he’d gotten it in New York and mentioned that he’d been on the Harriet Lane, then gave up his fussing, put the crest away, and sat down to talk.
The two men quickly discovered that they enjoyed each other’s company. Gunn found Bunch a “chatty, diplomatic, amusingly British person in manner, speech, and opinions.” Bunch confided to Gunn, as the heir to the throne had, perhaps, confided to him, that Bertie might further his worldly education with a visit to the South and to the West Indies. (Bunch probably did not say how much that prospect horrified him.) The consul told tales of serving at several South American posts and regaled his new acquaintance with stories about his seven long years in South Carolina that left the reporter “half-laughing” for most of the time they were together.
For his part, Gunn had set out for Charleston on the side-wheeler Marion. His fellow passengers had included Southern medical students headed home to join regiments, an eccentric old sea captain who’d been to the Arctic and who now wrote pro-secession poetry, and an evil-looking dentist whose conversation Gunn summed up in a single sentence: “We have paid for our niggers, and we are going to keep ’em, by God!” It was a long trip.
“The first news that awaited us on landing was that we were ‘out of the United States,’ ” Gunn told Bunch, who was slightly bemused. The reporter was not much impressed by what he saw of Charleston. “It looks like a small, old-fashioned New York,” he said. Gunn had ridden on top of the coach taking him to the Charleston Hotel, and as he looked around on that Sunday afternoon, the little city was dead quiet.
For Gunn and for other British journalists from the North who had come down to cover secession, Her Majesty’s man in South Carolina became a favorite source and an indispensable friend on the lonely and treacherous streets of Charleston. For Bunch, these visitors served several purposes and, in a few cases, posed serious risks. Some of them might have been spies, although for whom was never entirely clear. Some worked for publications that were rabidly hostile to the slaveholding South and reported under false names. Bunch entertained them, informed them; when possible he protected them. But he also used them. Through his journalist contacts and friends, he could filter out to the rest of the world his views of events in South Carolina and in the South that supported the private dispatches he was sending to Lyons and to London. Nothing amplified a diplomatic dispatch as much as a well-placed newspaper article. The only risk, and it was considerable, was that someone might reveal him as the source.
—
THREE DAYS AFTER Gunn’s arrival, on the morning of December 27, 1860, Charleston woke to explosive news. The night before, Maj. Robert Anderson, the fifty-five-year-old commander of the Federal garrison, had transferred his entire unit out of the indefensible Fort Moultrie, moving his men in small boats so as not to attract attention, to the still-not-quite-finished Fort Sumter commanding the entrance to Charleston Harbor. Sumter was designed to be manned by more than six hundred officers and men. Anderson had only eighty-five soldiers, eight of whom were musicians. But the drums of war had picked up their pace.
At the Charleston Hotel, a blustery soldier of fortune with a wild-looking walrus mustache and a euphonious name, Maj. Roswell Ripley, hammered on the doors of anyone he could think to tell, bellowing, “By God, Bob’s got ’em now. He’s in Sumter, and all hell can’t get him out!”
Ripley already had quite a reputation around town. He was born in Ohio, raised in New York, and his most recent employment had been in England, trying to sell Sharps rifles made in Connecticut to be used by British troops in the Crimea. But Ripley, who was graduated from West Point in 1843 and fought in most of the big battles of the Mexican War, was eager to get back into uniform. He figured, rightly, that he knew a whole lot more about soldiering, and especially about artillery, than these Carolina militia boys dressed up like French Zouaves and parading for their belles. So he’d fight and rise in rank and fight some more for Carolina or a new Confederacy. But he couldn’t help admiring old Bob Anderson, the stern-looking Kentuckian who’d taught artillery at West Point and been wounded badly in the Mexican campaigns. The secret deployment to the nearly impregnable Fort Sumter was the right move—the only move—Anderson could make if he was going to hold out. He was now ensconced behind walls five feet thick with forty-two-pound guns at his disposal. All of Charleston understood the significance of his action. He did not intend to surrender peacefully. The annihilation Governor Gist had talked about might be closer than people thought.
Down on Meeting Street, meanwhile, Charleston’s now-ex-member of Congress Laurence Massillon Keitt was in a state of apoplectic rage. Only a week had passed since Keitt’s high spirits were on display in Washington. There he’d burst into a wedding reception attended by President Buchanan, brandishing a telegram announcing South Carolina’s secession and shouting, “Thank God! Thank God!” (Buchanan thought at first there was a fire outside, and when his hostess brought him the actual news, he slumped back in his chair, and, clenching his hands on the arms, all he could think to say was, “Madam, might I beg you to have my carriage called?”) Now Keitt stood outside the Mills House “blaspheming in a most energetic manner,” Gunn reported.
Bunch and several of the semi-clandestine correspondents joined the crowds checking out the bulletins posted at the local newspaper offices, thereby gathering quantities of information and misinformation. Gunn dashed off a report claiming that the city was “frantic—the leading secessionists tearing their hair, and Major Anderson the hero of the occasion.” (Whose hero, Gunn did not say.) Anderson had spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie, and wild rumors spread that they’d been booby-trapped to explode if anyone tried to render them serviceable again. (Untrue.) Anderson supposedly had taken “four hundred men” to Sumter (five times the number he had), with its guns that “command the harbor and the city.”
Bunch had asked around about the range and the direction of Sumter’s guns. He was worried for his house and his family. But Sumter was not built to attack the city; it was built to defend it and to dominate the entrance to the harbor. The effective range of its artillery was about two miles, so it wasn’t likely its shells would rain down on Meeting Street; although from the top floor of Bunch’s house it may have been possible to glimpse the hulking masonry of Sumter three and a half miles away and, were they to begin firing, the flash of its big guns.
For Bunch the most important news of the moment was that the secessionists were seizing all the Federal posts and property that they could. Bunch’s first visit was to the U.S. Custom House, which he determined “no longer exists.” The collector said henceforth all revenues would go to South Carolina. After initial hesitation, the South Carolina militias seized Fort Moultrie and, most important, the Charleston Arsenal, along with its twenty thousand firearms.
“The city is in a terrible state of excitement just now,” Bunch told Lyons. If Anderson’s move was “by order of the government, matters do not look pacific. It is possible, however, that the officer in command may have done it of his own accord, thinking Fort Moultrie untenable, as it certainly is. The news has only just come—the people are infuriated, and it is very likely that before this reaches Washington, Your Lordship may have heard by telegraph that an assault has been made.”
In the meantime, the Secession Convention had picked three of its own grandees to go to Washington to present their terms to the Federal government. Bunch sent Lyons a quick sketch of each one: Robert W. Barnwell, “a planter of perfectly respectable character, but of no experience whatsoever in public affairs”; James L. Orr, “late speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States, a person well known at Washington, and possessed of some talent with conciliatory manners”; and “General J. H. Adams,” whom Bunch had visited at Oak Hall Plantation and whom he knew all too well. Bunch described Adams without further elaboration as “late a Governor of South Carolina, a man of violent character and impulses, and an ardent advocate of the revival of the African Slave Trade.”
President Buchanan agreed to meet with the three as private citizens and for two hours listened to their too-familiar justifications for tearing the Union apart. This was an ultimatum, it seemed, not a negotiation. But all Buchanan wanted to do at this point, and all he could do, was leave the problem to his successor. The United States might cease to be, but not on his watch. “You are pressing me too importunately,” said the weary president. “You don’t give me time to consider. You don’t give me time to say my prayers. I always say my prayers when required to act upon a great state affair.” He wished he could call a carriage that would take him away from all this, but that would have to wait several more weeks until Lincoln’s inauguration put an end to his dreadful errand.
—
AT THE CHARLESTON HOTEL, things were getting ugly. Thomas Butler Gunn’s newfound friend Captain Colt, an agent for the arms company that bore his family name, had a violent altercation with one of his competitors in the business and feared that he, a “damned Yankee,” might be jumped by a mob or shot in the back. Both Colt and Gunn started carrying pistols in their pockets (probably joking about each other’s names), and they went looking for advice to another new acquaintance, Charley Lamar, who was by then famous far and wide as the man behind the Wanderer. Over dinner and drinks in the hotel, Colt asked Lamar how he’d handle the man threatening him. “If he gives you any trouble, call him out and shoot him,” Lamar said, as if that were the simplest thing in the world. Such was the spirit of the times: a New York arms dealer trying to peddle guns to the South consulting the most notorious slaver in the country about how to confront the man who might murder him.
“I must add here,” Gunn wrote in his notes about the evening with Lamar, “that the Charlestonians speak of the Slave Trade as though it were an amiable weakness—a virtue pushed to excess.”
—
JUDAH P. BENJAMIN stood to address the U.S. Senate on December 28, a cane on one side, a pistol on the other. He would sit in this chamber “now no more forever,” he said, even as he rationalized with lawyerly rhetoric the position taken by the South. “We desire, we beseech you, let this parting be in peace,” said Benjamin. “Indulge in no vain delusion that duty or conscience, interest or honor, imposes upon you the necessity of invading our States or shedding the blood of our people. You have no possible justification for it.” Varina Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, remembered that Benjamin “held his audience spellbound for over an hour, and so still were they that a whisper could have been heard.”
“The fortunes of war may be adverse to our arms,” Benjamin declaimed, “you may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flame….You may, under the protection of your advancing armies, give shelter to the furious fanatics who desire, and profess to desire, nothing more than to add all the horrors of a servile insurrection to the calamities of civil war; you may do all this—and more, too, if more there be—but you can never subjugate us.”
What Benjamin did not say—publicly, at least—was that his fellow Southerners seemed intent on destroying themselves. The Buchanan government that he and Slidell had worked hard to shape was now falling apart in front of their eyes. Even before South Carolina seceded, Howell Cobb had resigned from Treasury and gone home to Georgia. General Cass tendered his resignation, then tried to withdraw it, only to have Buchanan accept it; Cass was furious that Buchanan failed to reinforce the forts in Charleston Harbor as Andrew Jackson had done three decades before. Then it was Slidell’s turn to berate Buchanan: why hadn’t the president said explicitly that he would not defend the forts? The weary head of state, his cabinet in chaos, his friends abandoning him, appeared to many a broken man.
The great irony of secession was that, if it were to be peaceful, it needed the cover given by a Federal government at least partly sympathetic to its complaints. For all the romantic, fire-eating bellicosity of the would-be rebels, for all the martial traditions of their slave-owning, slave-fearing society, and with all the guns they took from Federal arsenals, they still were no match for the industrial power of the North. Secession could be framed in the context of war, but to succeed, it needed to be carried out in a context of complicity. A test of arms would be an invitation to disaster, and those who knew something of the way the battlefield had changed over the previous decade understood that perfectly well.
Benjamin was not a warrior, but he was as fascinated by technology as he was by many other subjects, and his frequent trips to Europe gave him a chance to see just how fast the science of armaments was progressing: the development of more accurate rifles firing the lethal Minié balls; the perfection of artillery with a range of five miles or more. Benjamin understood the importance of capital and steel when it came to winning a modern war, and the South did not have enough of either. So his vision of the North bringing “torch and fire” to the cities of the Confederacy was not mere rhetoric. If the delicate process of secession went wrong, his prophecy would become a virtual certainty.
—
“THINGS LOOK INDEED very serious in America,” Lord Russell wrote to Lord Lyons at the end of December in a note that betrayed a certain lack of comprehension and a deep wish the problem would just go away. Europe was in disarray, its delicate balances shifting. War and rebellion swept Italy, and the French emperor kept moving his support from one contending party to another. Christians were being massacred in Syria and Lebanon, and the only force that would or could stand up to their Muslim attackers, strangely, was the chivalrous old warrior from Algeria, Abd el-Kader, who’d been exiled to Damascus by the French. The Second Opium War in China had dragged on for four years. The Raj still suffered from the traumas of the Sepoy Mutiny, and the Russian bear was lumbering, as ever, toward India. The fact was, the British Empire was stretched thin, and this trouble in America was only one crisis among many.
“I don’t see how the North is to bridle its tongue about slavery,” Russell wrote, “but if the South does not wish secession, she may be content with a pledge that the president will not propose abolition.” If Lord Russell had been reading the dispatches more closely, he’d have known that Lincoln did not propose abolition, and the South nonetheless did want secession. But he understood the bottom line in any case: “I fear there is no hope, or hardly any hope, of a compromise,” said Lord Russell. “For ourselves, unless we are asked to mediate, I think we can do nothing more than deprecate collision. The South may have much to be thankful for that they have yet two months before they finally decide,” that is, before Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861. “I hope they will use them wisely.”