WHILE CHARLESTONIANS PARTIED AND INTRIGUED, flirted and flaunted their finest during Race Week, delegates from the seven slave states that had already seceded called to order their convention in Montgomery, the dreary capital of Alabama. The delegates and those who wanted to meet them were packed into a filthy hotel called the Exchange, where they did much of their politicking and the informal part of their constitution writing at the bar.
They were hearing that some of the more sober voices in the South, realizing they were on the front line of a war to come, had begun to question and even to revile the fire-eaters who had brought this upon them. “Spratt wants the slave trade restored,” marveled Alfred Huger, the Charleston postmaster, calling the mere idea “our degradation.” “What an awful price to pay,” he wrote to a friend, “even for liberty and for slavery!!! The South cannot have one without the other, but to fall back on barbarism and again undertake the taming of the cannibal is more than I am willing to bargain for!”
Certainly the message had reached Montgomery that talk of reopening the Atlantic slave trade would create problems with the British. Bunch had made sure of that in one conversation after another, first with Rhett and then with other delegates who went though Charleston, telling them they’d do better to ban the slave trade with Africa outright and “spontaneously” rather than “waiting for it to be demanded of the Confederacy, as it certainly would be, before its recognition by the Great Powers of Europe.” In this, Bunch was going far beyond his brief. He seemed to be encouraging the Southerners to think recognition would be theirs for the asking if only they would make a few adjustments in their policies and pronouncements.
Yet Bunch knew that was not likely to be the case. He’d done just about everything he could over the previous five years to warn the Crown against recognizing these slaveholding, slave-trading republics under any circumstances. In fact, he was showing the skeptical Lord Russell, whom he informed of these conversations, that the Southerners were being given every chance to embrace policies Her Majesty’s government might accept—knowing full well that even if they did ban the slave trade, it would be a deception. Russell, for his part, commended Bunch’s discretion.
As with many diplomats and spies—who are also functionaries and bureaucrats—Robert Bunch had to try to protect his back as he moved through the maze of duplicity he’d constructed around himself. He did not report everything he did (even in his private letters to Lyons we do not hear much about his time spent with the pious slave-owning Blakes or the wily secessionist Trescot, when he must have dissembled endlessly even as he enjoyed the luxuries of their plantations), but he tried to report enough to cover himself if he was caught out. At the same time he constantly tried to read the winds of opinion among his superiors. If he had an inkling that, despite his best secret dispatches, London was inclined to go ahead with recognition of the Confederacy—and certainly such talk was in the air—then he needed to prepare the way for his future. Bunch had principles, but he had to remain in place if he was going to effect them.
At that critical moment, as the slaveholders rushed to create their Confederacy before Lincoln’s inauguration, the Montgomery delegates around the bar at the Exchange Hotel had concerns about the African trade that were even more immediate than their worries about European recognition. The issue, they knew, was a potential political disaster for them. The Virginians were critically important. They had not yet decided to secede and they were absolutely and adamantly against the importation of cheap Africans that would undercut the value of the slaves they exported to the Deep South. Maryland was in play, as well, and had some of the same concerns. If the new Confederacy could bring those two states into its fold, Washington would be surrounded, and the war would be won before it was begun. If it could not get either of them to join, its credibility and its strategic position would be badly weakened. So, despite the continued opposition of fire-eaters such as Rhett, the majority of the delegates in Montgomery voted to outlaw the importation of slaves from Africa or, significantly, from any other state or region outside the borders of the new Confederacy—which, at that moment, meant Virginia and Maryland. If those two states wanted to keep their markets as slave sellers, they would have to join the new republic of slave buyers.
Bunch and Lyons understood all these political calculations. They considered the new Confederate constitution an utterly unreliable guide to the likely actions of the individual Confederate states and reported that to London. A republic based on the right of its members to secede would not have much authority to enforce its will on this question, especially if some of the most important states decided on their own to start importing Africans.
“Not much reliance can be placed upon the present proceedings,” Lyons advised Lord Russell after publication of the Confederate constitution. “The acts of the Southern congress are now all directed toward producing immediate effects in the Border States and in the countries of Europe. Thus it has prohibited the Slave Trade, partly in deference to public opinion in Europe, but still more in order to conciliate Virginia and other states interested in the domestic Slave Trade. It has reserved to itself the power to prohibit the trade in Slaves with States not members of the new Confederacy, in order to alarm the breeders of Slaves in the states which have not yet seceded. The lever with which it hopes to move Great Britain and the other powers of Europe is of course Cotton.”
Just how important that lever would be depended on the markets, however, and as it happened, there had been record crops and record exports in 1859 and 1860. The Southerners talked about the millions of British factory workers who could be put out of jobs with a cotton boycott or if the supply was cut off by a Union blockade. But Britain had a surplus of cotton warehoused. Its mills would not be in desperate need of new supplies for another year, if then. From the market’s point of view, the whole crisis looked as if it might be over in plenty of time to keep the looms of Lancashire running.
The Montgomery delegates named Jefferson Davis president of the Confederacy and approved a new cabinet in late February. From Charleston, Bunch sent Lord Russell a long dispatch about those members he knew “personally or by their reputation.” And as often as he could, Bunch hit buttons he knew would trigger concern in London, if not, indeed, alarm. He put the slave-trade issue to one side for the moment and shifted his focus to the question of the Confederacy’s ambitions in the Caribbean and Central America.
Bunch wrote that Jefferson Davis’s views throughout his time in public life had been “of the extremest Southern and Pro-Slavery character.” He described him as “a firm believer in the ‘manifest destiny’ of the South to overrun and convert into Slave-holding states of a Southern Confederacy, Mexico, Central America, and Cuba.” Such moves would put this new nation, if such it were, into direct conflict with Britain’s interests and with Britain’s navy. Davis “was a very warm advocate of the expeditions of López, Walker, and other Filibusters,” and Bunch thought the main reason Davis was elected was because of his military reputation. The former U.S. secretary of war had a problematic penchant for the use of force and, Bunch suggested, was likely to use it if the South succeeded in establishing itself as an independent empire.
The rest of the new government was of less interest to Bunch. The vice president, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was suspected of Unionist inclinations. The new Confederate secretary of state, Robert Toombs, also of Georgia, had been a U.S. senator and held other important posts, but he was no diplomat. Bunch called him “violent and impulsive” and “a secessionist of the worst kind.” (Toombs had arrived in Montgomery expecting he’d be named president, but his volatile temperament and obvious drunkenness during dinners at the Exchange Hotel were part of the reason the convention passed him over.) As secretary of state, Toombs would control the Confederacy’s foreign policy, Bunch noted, and “it is hoped that he will not hold that office long.” As for the new attorney general of the Confederacy, Judah P. Benjamin, he was not someone whose career Bunch had followed closely, and the consul lumped him in with the other members of the cabinet as “the dead level of mediocrity.”
Then, knowing full well he was overstepping the bounds of bureaucratic propriety (as he was always inclined to do), Bunch launched into a passionate denunciation of the Confederacy and everything it represented.
Bunch said he had the “firm conviction” that “the new Republic will never rise to eminence as a great power of the earth,” and he was perfectly blunt about his reasons. “It is, in the first place, founded upon the possession of what may be called a monopoly of one single production—Cotton. So soon as that staple is subjected to competition (and may that day soon arrive), so soon as its cultivation is impeded or destroyed by causes either physical or political, so soon as some cheaper or more available fiber shall be substituted for it, from that moment does the importance of these Southern States diminish and their claim to consideration disappear.” Bunch’s point: there was no long-term benefit for Britain if it supported the breakaway states just to get their cotton. Then he hammered home his central argument, writing privately precisely the opposite of what he’d told Rhett and suggested to other delegates on their way to Montgomery: “This new Confederacy is based upon the preservation and extension of Negro slavery,” Bunch said. “It seems, to my humble judgment, quite impossible that in the present age of the world, a government avowedly established for such purposes can meet with the sympathy and encouragement which are as necessary to Nations as to individuals.”
Writing from the epicenter of secession and surrounded by ferocious partisans of the new Confederacy, Bunch wanted to go on record with London saying he didn’t think the coalition of slave states could survive in “defiance of the sentiments of nature and of civilization.” Then Bunch took a breath and added the predictable caveats. He was not calling for Britain to interfere with the way another country organized its labor force, but he believed that the Confederates would be ostracized by world opinion and regarded as little more than growers of cotton and rice. Implicit in Bunch’s dispatch was the notion that if Britain sided with the South, even if the South won its gamble on secession, then Her Majesty’s government would lose.