WILLIAM SEWARD SAW SPIES EVERYWHERE, and his spies were everywhere. His police, informants, and private detectives kept a constant flow of information and allegations piling onto his desk. Legal guarantees for suspected traitors and secret agents were thrown out. When William Howard Russell met with Seward in July, the reporter accused the secretary of running what amounted to a police state, and Seward, for his part, was unapologetic: “The government will not shrink from using all the means which they consider necessary to restore the Union.” But as word got back to London of Seward’s activities, Palmerston raged against the effrontery of it all. “These North Americans,” he said, “are following fast the example of the Spanish Americans and the Continental despots. They commit all sorts of violence without regard to law, take up men and women and imprison them on mere suspicion, and rule the land by spies and police and martial law.”
Seward looked through the telegrams and dossiers. So many traitors, so many conspiracies. And there was one name that kept coming up again and again.
In June Seward got a report from John A. Kennedy, the superintendent of New York City’s Metropolitan Police (the force aligned with Seward and his Republican friends) stating unequivocally “the British consul at Charleston, Mr. Bunch, is a notorious secessionist, and that he has used his position in every way he could since the troubles began in aiding the secession movement.” Kennedy’s letter complained that Bunch had issued passports to dubious characters, including one William Trappman, an American citizen who had served as the Prussian consul in Charleston. It appears from other correspondence that Trappman was involved in efforts to buy arms for the Confederacy. He had nearly been arrested aboard a steamer leaving Boston in mid-June but had said he was carrying correspondence for Lord Lyons and presented a Bunch-issued travel document. The Boston police allowed him to sail, only to discover a few hours later that Seward had ordered Trappman’s arrest for treason.
It was not extraordinary that Britain’s official consul would try to help out Prussia’s honorary one, or that Bunch and Lyons used him to carry correspondence, but Seward’s agents thought they now had Bunch dead to rights.
The police superintendent stated flatly that Bunch “used his office for facilitating the transmission of treasonable correspondence.” The evidence was, to say the least, circumstantial. A Belgian merchant who was known to have secessionist sympathies and who might have left for Europe on a mission for the Confederacy “is in the habit of receiving letters from Charleston,” which he would pick up at the office of Consul Archibald in New York, the police superintendent wrote. The police claimed that Archibald’s deputy told them that before the mails from the South were stopped the New York consulate regularly received “packages of letters from Mr. Bunch for strange persons of whom they had no knowledge.”
Seward’s response was, for him, surprisingly measured. He decreed that all passports issued in the United States would have to be countersigned by him if they were to be valid. He sent a copy of the police report with a private note to Lord Lyons, and Lyons, apparently shocked, said Bunch must not have been aware of the courier’s arms-buying activities.
Only a few weeks later, in July, the police picked up another suspect. Purcell M’Quillan, also written as Purcell M. Quillen, was an Irishman who’d been working as a clerk in a Charleston carpet warehouse. He had asked for a passport from Bunch so he could go visit his father in Baltimore. When he was arrested, manacled, and sent to the infamous prison at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, M’Quillan was, like many other suspected Southern agents and sympathizers, denied habeas corpus. The ostensible charges were spying for the rebels and trying to buy weapons, but M’Quillan was released after a few weeks following protests by Lord Lyons. He may never have been involved in anything untoward, and it is plausible that the main reason the clerk was picked up was so Seward’s men could gather more information on Robert Bunch.
The Charleston consul pretended to be unperturbed about all this. After all, M’Quillan was just one of so many messengers he’d sent northward. “I had some conversation with him when I gave him his passport (which I did after full inquiry, an examination on oath, etc.),” Bunch wrote to Lyons. “I asked him if he were going to Washington on his return to Charleston, and on his replying in the affirmative gave him a line to Your Lordship stating that he was a respectable young man and might be trusted with anything you might have for me. Of course, he may have been buying arms for the Southern Confederacy, but I really do not believe it.”
Lyons was worried. The secret mission to Richmond to try to win Confederate compliance with the Declaration of Paris was approaching, and Bunch, the man he’d put in charge of it, already was under scrutiny. “Her Majesty’s government does not wish for an éclat here, so be particularly careful to avoid bringing one on, either as respects yourself or me,” Lyons warned Bunch. “They have already got stories about you and the persons to whom you have given passports to the North, which I shall do all I can to put straight. They make it necessary for you to be particularly cautious.” At about the same time, Lyons wrote to Lord John Russell that he saw “symptoms of a determination here” to make Bunch “an object of attack.” Lyons concluded by saying, “I have no doubt he will manage the negotiations about the Declaration of Paris as well and as prudently as any man.” But the secrecy around the mission to Richmond was compromised before it ever started.
Hearing generally of Seward’s concerns, Bunch could not figure out what was wrong: “The amusing part of all this to me is that the U.S. government should think, as it evidently does, that I have been working against them.” The Confederates might accuse him of undermining their cause with good reason, he figured. But this was baffling. “I am perhaps wasting a good deal of indignation, as I do not know what is or is not alleged against me.” He was just picking up signals from Lyons, Archibald, and one of the attachés in Washington, none of whom, it seems, had told him about the inquiries and allegations being made by the New York Metropolitan Police. “All allude to something, and I am really curious to know what it is.”
Given all the pressure being put on them, Lyons and his consuls tried to find secure means of communications. More and more of their telegrams and letters were written in diplomatic cipher or admiralty cipher or whatever cipher they could find—for a while they were trading ciphers around like recipes for desserts. The mails were completely unreliable, and, as the Trappman and M’Quillan cases suggested, informal messengers might have—or might be alleged to have—dubious loyalties and connections. Eventually Lyons started dispatching Royal Navy cruisers to Charleston to pick up messages from Bunch. But in the meantime he used a company called Adams Express, a forerunner of today’s parcel services, which managed to operate in both the South and the North. Probably it was not very safe, either. Its head of security was Allan Pinkerton, whose detective agency was a Seward favorite.