LYONS WARNED BUNCH THAT William Howard Russell was on his way down to Charleston, but three days after Fort Sumter surrendered, the world’s greatest war correspondent still had not arrived. Bunch said that in any case he was ready to help him in every possible way. “He will find four dinners a day if he can eat them, as the people are perfectly wild to make a favorable impression on him.” Bunch insisted he was “not particularly” an admirer, but the attentions of such a famous journalist would be hard for him to resist, and Lyons, for his part, wanted to make sure that the opinionated consul got the right kind of messages across to this redoubtable newspaperman.
In Washington, Russell had won over Lyons immediately. “I was disposed to think kindly towards him,” the minister admitted to Bunch, “because he spoke well and truly of my father [the admiral who commanded the Mediterranean Fleet] in his letters from the Crimea.” Lyons, who did not want to see Her Majesty’s government recognize the new Confederate States of America, knew that if William Seward followed through on his bluster about blockading Southern harbors or declaring them “no longer ports of entry,” London would react strongly, and “I don’t see how the question of recognition can be kept off.” Lyons also told Bunch confidentially that the American envoy in London had been ordered to seek assurances that Britain would not recognize the Confederacy and came away with a very noncommittal answer. So it was imperative that Bunch say nothing to Russell that would encourage London to recognize the South.
“I shall be careful to conform my language to Your Lordship’s wishes,” Bunch assured him. “The information conveyed to me is indeed most important and shall be made a discreet use of.” Then he added the obvious: “Late events will change the aspect of affairs very materially at home and abroad.”
In the aftermath of Sumter, Lincoln was calling up 75,000 soldiers, provoking “sudden and immeasurable enthusiasm” in the North that surprised even its leaders. Two days later, Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation offering “letters of marque” to legalize privateers who attacked Federal ships. Lincoln responded by proclaiming a blockade of Confederate ports and declaring that Confederate privateers would be treated as pirates and hanged.
This was just what Lyons and Bunch had been dreading. Neither of them wanted to see the Crown throw its weight behind the South, which the blockade of Southern ports might provoke. But London hated privateers almost as much as it hated blockades, and that created some room for diplomatic maneuvering. “Privateers from the Confederacy will be, in plain language, pirates,” said Bunch. There would be plenty to talk about with the man from the Times—discreetly, of course.
By the time W. H. Russell and Sam Ward finally arrived in Charleston, the air was full of that electric excitement that always marks the beginning of a long-anticipated war. And, thanks to the hospitality of Her Britannic Majesty’s consul, Russell found himself almost as well connected in South Carolina as he had been in Washington. “Very civil and seems a very nice fellow,” W. H. Russell jotted in his diary after his first meeting with Robert Bunch on that first day, and Bunch felt the same about Russell. “I like him very much and am much impressed by his powers of observation and conversation,” Bunch wrote to Lyons.
As quickly as he could, Russell arranged to visit Fort Moultrie, where crates of Champagne and French paté were piled outside the tents, and Fort Sumter, where he ran into Louis Wigfall, the drunken, self-appointed Confederate colonel who’d brought the terms of surrender to Maj. Robert Anderson. The infamous duelist was dressed in a mix of military and civilian clothes—a blue frock coat with a red sash, a straight ceremonial sword at his belt, a loose silk handkerchief around his muscular neck, “and wild masses of black hair, tinged with gray” falling out from under his civilian hat. A stubble of beard had grown across Wigfall’s square jaw, and then there was the look in his eye: “flashing, fierce, yet calm—with a well of fire burning behind and spouting through it, an eye pitiless in anger, which now and then sought to conceal its expression beneath half-closed lids, and then burst out with an angry glare, as if disdaining concealment.”
Russell came away deeply unimpressed with evidence of battle: “A very small affair, indeed, that shelling of Fort Sumter,” he wrote. “Never did men plunge into unknown depth of peril and trouble more recklessly than these Carolinians.”
As Russell and his group arrived back in Charleston after dusk, the city was a blaze of light, and the air was filled with the rolling of drums. Russell walked through the noisy streets toward the Mills House Hotel among droves of black men and women shuffling in haste to escape the last peal of the curfew bell and the patrols that followed it. “A squad of mounted horsemen, heavily armed, turned up a by-street, and with jingling spurs and sabers disappeared in the dust and darkness.” The horse patrol of the City Guard. “They scour the country around the city,” Russell was told, “and meet at certain places during the night to see if the niggers are all quiet.”
The next day Russell took a long trip through the harbor in a small boat to further inspect the forts, accompanied by a Confederate officer who wanted to talk about nothing but his passion for Thackeray’s novels. Then Russell went to dine with “our excellent Consul, Mr. Bunch, who had a small and very agreeable party to meet me.” There were no Wigfalls in this group. They were “as distinguished a party as I could collect,” Bunch told Lyons, “and a very fair showing of the best South Carolinians.” Among them was the aged postmaster, Alfred Huger (pronounced Hugee, Russell noted), who was despondent over the coming of war. “I have lived too long,” he said as tears rolled down his cheeks. “I should have died ere these evil days arrived.” But he did not doubt that the South would emerge victorious.
“Only one of the company, a most lively, quaint, witty old lawyer named Petigru, dissented from the doctrines of Secession,” wrote Russell, “but he seems to be treated as an amiable, harmless person.”
The dinner at Bunch’s house began at five and lasted almost until midnight: a measure of its success. But genteel as the guests might have been, the discussion grew heated as the evening wore on, and Russell found it increasingly disagreeable to hear the Carolinians talk about England as if it had no interests that were not purely material. “Why, sir,” boasted one of the guests, “we have only to shut off your supply of cotton for a few weeks, and we can create a revolution in Great Britain. There are four millions of your people depending on us for their bread, not to speak of the many millions of dollars. No, sir, we know that England must recognize us.”
Toward the end of Bunch’s dinner party, Russell took the consul aside to say he was fed up with the other guests. “If Great Britain is such a sham as they suppose, the sooner a hole is drilled in her and the whole empire sunk under water, the better.”
Bunch laughed. “You won’t mind it when you get as accustomed to this sort of thing as I am.”
In the days that followed, Russell came to depend on Bunch as a touchstone of British common sense in a city of unruly passions, and also as a vital link for communications with the outside world. Russell, who worried that his wife would die in England or that some other family emergency might befall them while he was incommunicado, arranged to have any emergency telegrams sent to Charleston in care of Bunch. Meanwhile he sent his letters for the Times north to Washington or New York and on to London using Bunch’s mailbag and his messengers. Often Russell ran so late writing his dispatches that he nearly missed the shipment. A couple of times Bunch had to stick the envelopes on the outside of bags that already were sealed and about to head on their way.
Soon the consul’s frank opinions and analyses, so rarely heard by his circle of acquaintances in Charleston, started to make their way anonymously into Russell’s copy—so much so that later, when Russell’s newspaper dispatches from South Carolina were questioned by some British officials, Bunch leapt to their defense. The second letter Russell filed from Charleston, for instance, talked about the way South Carolina aristocrats flirted with the idea of restoring the British monarchy, or some branch of it, in their Confederacy. The idea sounded absurd to many people, including Bunch’s superiors. But Bunch wrote directly to Lord Russell in London and to Lyons in Washington to assure them that, strange as it might seem, W. H. Russell’s reporting had been spot-on.
Bunch did not want the journalist’s credibility to be doubted on any point, including even the royal fantasies of the Charleston aristocracy. It was more important still that Russell convey, convincingly, the quotidian barbarity of slavery and, if possible, present his readers in London with evidence that the African trade was no mirage. The consul had discovered in W. H. Russell a way to have his own views dramatized and amplified for a worldwide audience and, most especially, for the ministers who worked on Downing Street. They might ignore one or another of his dispatches (even though Lyons kept drawing their attention to them), but they could not entirely dismiss the Times, and when both lines of communication converged, the effect could be powerful, indeed. Or so Bunch hoped.
As Russell continued his travels through the South, his portraits of the people and their cause were his own, but clearly they were informed by what he had heard from the British consul. Bunch was “indiscreet” because when he spoke confidentially with the correspondent, the consul’s views were obviously and thoroughly different from those of the people among whom he was posted. But Bunch’s apparent indiscretions were, in fact, very much to the point. Nobody else Russell talked to could describe for him so vividly or so frankly the way the Southerners thought, the place that slavery occupied in their society, and the ends to which they were willing to go to build a new empire. Russell, throughout his travels, continued to write back and forth with Bunch, who continued to be a vital link for his communications with the outside world. Russell’s letters to the Times from the South grew increasingly negative. He meditated on the evils of bondage as he saw them firsthand, and eventually he did, indeed, discover evidence of his own that the infamous slave trade with Africa was being revived.