ROBERT BUNCH WAS ABOUT to undertake the most important diplomatic assignment of his career, but if it worked, nobody outside the Foreign Office and a handful of people directly involved would know what he had done. He would use third parties to keep his name and his government’s role out of it, and he would use a lot of creative ambiguity—that tool of diplomacy and espionage that lets people understand what they want to understand without any express commitment—in order to get the job done.
The goal was nothing less than to define the rules of war and of commerce for Britain and other neutral powers at a time when both the South and the North had created a situation of dangerous, and potentially disastrous, confusion.
In April, in the aftermath of Sumter, Lincoln and Seward had declared a Federal blockade of Southern ports. This recognized the fact that Washington could not simply close them as if it were still in control, because it was not. But a blockade normally was an act carried out against a hostile power, not against one’s own citizens. So the British government decided to clarify the matter by announcing in May that Great Britan recognized a state of belligerency between “the Government of the United States of America and certain states styling themselves the Confederate States of America.”
This announcement, as Lord John Russell put it, was a matter “not of principle, but of fact,” and carried with it limited, though important, consequences. Under international law at that time, belligerents had standing that rebels did not have. Belligerents could get loans abroad, they could buy military and naval supplies, they could visit foreign ports. Their revenue laws would be respected. Their flag would, indeed, be recognized. Belligerents were granted “a quasipolitical recognition.”
Washington was furious, and Richmond, the new Confederate capital, was jubilant. But the measure did not open the way to the economic and military support for the South that William Seward desperately opposed, or that Jefferson Davis desperately wanted. In practical terms it was much more about definition than about recognition. Britain as well as France, which soon followed suit, wanted to be sure of their own national rights as neutrals in dealing with the two contending American governments and their armed forces. Britain and France were ready to go to war if they felt those rights were infringed, but they wanted to try a diplomatic route first, which is where Robert Bunch came in.
Under the 1856 Declaration of Paris that Clarendon had negotiated, neutral ships flying the flags of neutral nations had clearly defined rights: They could carry goods belonging to either of the belligerents without fear they’d be seized, as long as those goods were not “contraband of war,” which was taken at that time to mean weapons. Neutral goods on the ships of belligerents would be immune from seizure by enemy ships, with the same caveat about contraband. And, finally, any blockade would have to be “maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the coast of the enemy.” It would not be enough for the Union simply to make a declaration saying that, for instance, Charleston was under blockade. The Union had to have warships in place to make that policy effective.
But there was one big problem with this tidy legalistic approach. Neither of the belligerents was a signatory to the Declaration of Paris, and neither was obliged to honor it.
In Washington, Lyons and the French minister, Count Henri Mercier, were working on Seward to try to get the U.S. government to sign on to the Declaration. The Confederates posed a more complicated challenge. London and Paris did not even want to acknowledge they were talking to them. The trick was to get them to act as if they’d voluntarily decided to embrace the neutrality and blockade provisions of the Declaration.
Lord Russell thought Consul Mure, in New Orleans, would be the man for the job, perhaps because he was older, perhaps because Russell did not know how far New Orleans was from the new Confederate capital in Richmond, or perhaps because Russell had never been fond of Bunch’s tone, his observations, or his presumptions in his dispatches. (Others, such as Permanent Undersecretary Edmund Hammond, had entirely lost their patience with Bunch.)
But Lord Lyons felt strongly that Her Majesty’s man in Charleston, whom he had worked with so closely over the last year and felt he had gotten to know so well, would be just the diplomat for the job. Lyons had become Bunch’s defender and promoter, protecting him from criticism and extolling the virtues of his reporting to London. Lyons never really had anyone else in mind. But, still, Lyons must have known that appointing Bunch to handle the most sensitive diplomatic initiative of the war up to that point was a very risky proposition. Already, ominously, there were signs that Seward’s detectives—in effect, his secret police—had taken a decided interest in Bunch and his messengers.