ROBERT BUNCH WAS IN THE eye of a storm that was about to shake the world like a Carolina hurricane. Her Britannic Majesty’s consul in a small city in the American South, fighting to rectify a retrograde law that endangered a handful of black British citizens but enraged Her Majesty’s government, had become the single most trustworthy source of information about a fast-approaching war with vast and as yet unimagined consequences.
He was worried for his family—probably he was terrified for them—but he also was exhilarated. He wanted to see everything. He wanted to know everything. And while he had never spent much time writing or thinking about the military, now he focused much of his attention on the deployments of the Federal Army and the soldiers of South Carolina.
Out at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, Tom Gunn’s soldier-of-fortune friend Roswell Ripley now commanded some raw militias at Fort Moultrie, with his biggest guns trained on Bob Anderson at Sumter, and Anderson’s bigger guns trained on him. Ripley did not give himself much chance of survival if Sumter opened up on him. “Perhaps a couple of hours, or he may blow us to hell in half that time,” Ripley told Gunn.
For a few weeks the siege of Fort Sumter was oddly genteel. Charleston merchants kept the fort supplied with meat and rice, candles, oil, and other necessities. Robert and Henry Gourdin, from a prominent merchant family, kept up a running correspondence with their friend Maj. Anderson and helped him communicate with his wife and his brother. But the air of civility was deceptive. Each day held the potential for an explosion.
“Every one, old and young, is enrolled in some military company, and drilling is going on at all hours,” Bunch wrote in an official dispatch to Lord Russell. “The public excitement is kept alive by the constant arrival of telegrams, many of the most absurd and mendacious character. Nothing is spoken of but bloodshed, and reasonable counsels are entirely disregarded.”
On January 9, 1861, an unarmed ship sent by President Buchanan, the Star of the West, tried to resupply the garrison at Sumter. But in the blue-tinged light of early dawn, cadets from Charleston’s famous military academy, the Citadel, spotted the ship and took a few shots with newly positioned guns on Morris Island. The Star of the West steamed ahead and ran up the Stars and Stripes. Then Roswell Ripley, who had been fortifying his position at Fort Moultrie, started firing on the ship. He hit it twice. The Star of the West retreated. No one was killed, and the guns of Sumter remained quiet—to the great disappointment of the crew aboard the Star, and to the considerable surprise and relief of Ripley. After that, Anderson sent an officer with a flag of truce to Governor Pickens to warn he’d prevent any ships from entering or leaving the harbor. The governor threatened to block any effort at all to resupply Sumter. The siege tightened.
“Our little teapot was ruffled yesterday by a tempestuous gale, but the wind has gone down today,” Bunch wrote of the incident. “The Star of the West was fired into, and, very sensibly, ‘turned off,’ which I believe is the nautical term,” he told Lord Lyons. “I consider that Major Anderson has behaved with the greatest prudence and humanity, as he would certainly have done a great—and what is more in this country, a popular thing—had he fired into the batteries which fired into his ship.” By waiting and requesting further orders from Washington, he “gives the government another loophole of escape if they do not wish war,” Bunch wrote. “But I fear that the popular feeling at the North is rising, and if General Scott ‘goes to the country’ with a ‘cry’ about the U.S. flag having been fired upon, I should fear the worst.”
The Star of the West incident provoked a round of tense negotiations between Anderson and the new authorities in Charleston that went on for several days, and on January 13 Bunch wrote a cryptic note to Lyons. First, he wanted to let the minister in Washington know that he had mastered the new diplomatic cipher. Then he passed on an urgent, unencrypted bit of information: “I am assured…,” Bunch wrote, then crossed that out. “I am told,” he continued, “by a person in authority that [Anderson] could not be got to fire a gun now even if ordered. Is he going to turn traitor?” Probably that bit of intelligence and speculation came from William Henry Trescot, who was proving a very dangerous sort of source: highly placed but, whether by accident or intent, very often very wrong.
Whom to trust? Where to turn? Where was the conflict headed? Bunch tried to stand back from his emotions. He had never had any sympathy with the secessionists, but now, as one state after another withdrew from the Union, its dissolution appeared a plain fact. “Each day brings us the intelligence of some secession to the Southern cause,” Bunch wrote to Lord Russell. “Florida and Mississippi have certainly seceded, and I have no doubt that Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina will follow.” A new confederation was taking shape. It was almost impossible to imagine that Washington could recover all these territories. “Surely,” Bunch wrote to Lyons, “it is madness to try to coerce the entire South.”
As Robert Barnwell Rhett had foreseen, the claim that secession was done and irreversible eventually became the strongest argument the Southern states could make in the minds of Europe’s leaders: they had created a fait accompli, and to try to force them back into a Union they utterly despised would be insane. But at the center of the secession, right from the beginning, the day-to-day bother of trying to do business under an erratic, cobbled-together coalition of ferociously independent states began to trivialize and undermine the ambitious project of the Confederacy.
In early January the lights in the lighthouses and the lamps in the buoys marking the channels into Charleston Harbor were extinguished to prevent hostile ships from entering at night. But, of course, all shipping was put at risk. The South Carolinians, ever fearful of invasion by the Union’s Navy, kept claiming they’d sink hulks to block the passage, thus severing their own vital ties to the outside world.
As consul, one of Bunch’s first responsibilities was to facilitate British trade, but commerce with the port of Charleston was just about dead. And while the military leadership of the South eventually proved impressive, the political leadership did not, especially in those early days. “Our governor, I regret to say, is a hopeless fool,” Bunch wrote of Francis Wilkinson Pickens soon after the Star of the West skirmish. “People talk very seriously of impeaching him before the Legislatures. He is quite demented, everyone tells me—turns people out of his room by the shoulders, orders a thing at one minute and countermands it the next. It is not every one who can manage a revolution, even it if be in a teapot.”
Bunch found himself, unpleasantly, dealing with Judge A. G. Magrath as South Carolina’s new “secretary of state.” Her Majesty’s consul was careful not to use any formal title acknowledging Magrath’s supposed authority, but he still had to talk to the man. After a discussion of his consular duties, as Bunch told Lyons, both Mr. Magrath and a Mr. Cilcott, the new secretary of war, “thanked me very much and expressed themselves sensible of my friendly endeavors.” Bunch’s “smile of indifference” must have become a rictus. “It will do no harm by and by to have been on good terms with them,” wrote the ever-politic Bunch. “Secession is ‘coming in so strong’ that we must not be too fond of the U.S. government.”
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia did, indeed, secede, and the Georgians, to the admiration of one and all in Charleston, were smart enough to take all the Federal forts before they pulled out of the Union. Louisiana seceded on January 26 and Texas on February 1. Plans were well under way for a congress to convene in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, where a constitution would be written and a government chosen for the new Confederacy of slaveholding states.
Bunch the careerist wanted a piece of the diplomatic action. The British consul in Mobile, Charles Tulin, was a fool who spent almost no time in Alabama. His deputy, Charles Labuzan, had unvarnished slaveholding sympathies and was, thus, an unreliable reporter. Bunch may also have learned that his cousin and former boss in New York, Anthony Barclay, long since retired to a life of slaveholding leisure in Savannah, was angling to get back into diplomacy as Britain’s envoy to the new Southern republic. So Bunch offered himself up to Lyons as an observer at the Montgomery convention, or, failing that, said he would send his deputy. But Lyons did not go for it. He did not suspect that Bunch had any sympathy with the South; that was never a question for him. But Bunch was such an irrepressible climber, perhaps Lyons did not want to encourage him. Or Lyons may have feared, knowing the tone of Bunch’s letters, and never having seen Bunch in action in the South, that he might be indiscreet. The Charleston consul would report on the Montgomery convention from Charleston.
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THE CHARLESTONIANS WERE closing ranks. News surged and then ebbed, and the out-of-town journalists in the city were beginning to feel real fear. In an anonymous dispatch to the New-York Evening Post, Bunch’s new friend Tom Gunn wrote: “There is a system of espionage as complete as that organized by the first Napoleon. The gentlemanly stranger who, learning you are from the North, claims it as his own birthplace and sounds you with some mild Union sentiments, intimating his private conviction that ‘we have gone too far here.’ The barman who mixes your ‘cocktail,’ the colored waiter who attends assiduously upon our party at the hotel dinner and is much interested in the inevitable political conversations, the loungers in its hall or under its piazza—beware of each and all of them. Charleston is one vigilance committee.”
As Gunn reported later, the more formal group of vigilantes in Charleston included “men of all classes—planters, merchants, clerks, editors, gentlemen of independent fortunes, generally persons of standing and respectability, chosen by ballot.” Different members had different functions in this “amateur detective organization” created to defend the interests of a slave-owning society. “Every Southerner believes that hired emissaries are employed by the abolitionists of the North to run off slaves, to tamper with them, to tempt them to commit murder, arson, and all conceivable atrocities,” Gunn reported. More immediately relevant for him and his friends, many Southerners believed that Northern publications set out to instigate these crimes and that no pains or expenses were spared to circulate them in the South.
The vigilance committee in Charleston considered itself diligent in efforts to determine whether a suspect was accused falsely, but its operations were secret and silent. If a stranger was suspected, he was watched, and, if considered necessary, a professional detective, a Mr. Schuber, was put on his tail. Schuber would examine the suspect’s baggage, question him, and then take him before members of the committee. The suspect could produce witnesses or other evidence attesting to his innocence, but if he failed to convince the committee, he’d be escorted by the detective to a railroad or steamboat, and his fare paid as far as the next stop, where “another vigilance committee, duly apprised by telegraph, is waiting for him,” Gunn wrote. There, the treatment he received might not be so civilized.
When Gunn heard there was a rumor circulating in New York that he’d been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Charleston on a rail, he nearly panicked for fear someone would publish the bogus story and the people around him in Charleston, upon reading it, would make it come true. Bunch could commiserate: “A friend writes me from New York that I have been tarred and feathered.”
If Bunch was joking, this was gallows humor.
The consul had grown increasingly worried about his basic communications with Washington and London and, more generally, the outside world. With the mails frequently disrupted, correspondence often had to be sent with informal messengers, but could they really be trusted? Many people asked or begged Bunch to find ways to get their letters out safely, most of the time for commercial reasons, and some volunteered to carry the diplomatic pouch themselves, but that was not usually an altruistic gesture. The satchel gave the bearer some authority passing through checkpoints, and often the bearer would take other bags of unofficial mail as well. It was an awkward and unreliable system. Anything could go wrong. But Bunch resorted to it time and again. He had little choice.