ESPIONAGE IS A PROFESSION FULL of ironies. Robert Bunch, who had worked so hard for so long for the “disentanglement” of Britain from the cotton-growing South, now suddenly became the symbol of secret and supposedly growing ties between the Confederacy and the Crown. But Lyons knew, and Lord Russell knew, and, indeed, Lord Palmerston knew that Bunch had been doing what they asked him to do, and much more than that. The greatest irony was that he had done his job too well, earning the trust of people he despised in order to report honestly and accurately to Her Majesty’s government. But even his greatest defender, Lord Lyons, could not let that be known in Washington.
Bunch not only had convinced the people around him in Charleston that he accepted their ways and their world, he had also convinced Seward’s spies. They had followed his couriers. They had read the mail he sent. And yet somehow they had missed his “private” and “confidential” letters, which, after all, were only rarely written in cipher. Did Seward never see Bunch’s derisive portraits of the Confederate cabinet? Did he pay no attention to Bunch’s damning appraisal of the Confederacy as an offense against the sensibilities of the civilized world?
At the Foreign Office not everyone took Bunch’s side. Edmund Hammond, the Permanent Under-Secretary in London, told Lyons he was “thoroughly displeased” with Bunch. “He must have known the condition in which the consular correspondence is allowed to pass; if he is so obtuse as not to perceive that he was doing wrong in sending the numerous private letters…he is not fit for his post.”
“Don’t be hard upon Mr. Bunch until you get his full explanation,” Lyons told Hammond. “He has been so entirely cut off from communication that he hardly knows what are the particular points which tell against him.”
In truth, Lord Russell was not pleased with Bunch’s efforts at a “full explanation,” and even Lord Lyons was annoyed at what seemed rather futile hair-splitting. It turned out Bunch had not kept the Trescot mission entirely secret. He had consulted with two or three of his distinguished friends about it, one of whom might have written the incriminating unsigned note. And Bunch’s formal denial of the charges leveled against him by Seward rested on three points: he doubted that Mure had carried any dispatches from the Confederate government outside the sealed pouch; “there was not one single paper in my bag that was not entirely and altogether on Her Majesty’s service”; and the so-called passport he’d issued, to which Seward so objected, was really just a “certificate” to state that Mure was on official business. Bunch conceded he may have been stretching the point a bit on that document when he called Mure a “British merchant,” given that he was long since a naturalized American citizen and no longer, therefore, a “British subject.” Lyons curtly told Bunch he should quit the equivocating. It wasn’t going to help.
Lyons had grown concerned about his man in Charleston, who seemed increasingly desperate, perhaps because of his disappointments—his secret diplomatic triumph had become a disaster—and very probably because of his fears for his safety. He had never spent so much time in Charleston without a break. From the beginning of his time there it had seemed a sort of luxurious prison full of cruel and capricious inmates who could turn on him at any moment. Now week after week Bunch watched as his lines of communication were threatened, and, worse than that, so were his lines of escape.
Bunch, as long as he retained his official credentials, was able to visit the Union ships blockading Charleston and talk with their commanders. He also tried to stay in very close touch with the British naval vessels patrolling off the coast. This was normal, since they had begun to carry important dispatches, but as the pressures on Bunch grew, his judgment seemed to wane. On his own initiative, Bunch sent a letter to one of the British naval officers whose ship was observing the blockade, suggesting he make a show of force to help free a couple of British merchantmen holed up in the port of Beaufort. Admiral Milne, the commander of the British fleet, was outraged: the Bunch note flatly contradicted his instructions to his captains to avoid any act “which might involve the two countries in war.” Lyons scrambled to send a telegram stopping Milne from notifying London. “I was quite aghast,” Lyons said, a word he rarely used. Explaining himself to Milne, Lyons said, “Mr. Bunch is so zealous and useful a public servant, and has hitherto been so discreet, that I was unwilling anything so likely to injure him should go home without his own explanation.”
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THE “BUNCH AFFAIR” was taking on a life of its own. The tone of the exchanges in dispatches from Seward and in the meetings that Adams had with Lord Russell in London grew so acerbic and belligerent that the crisis became “the great question” before the British government and grew “darker and darker every day,” said Lord Russell. But the treatment of Robert Bunch, a representative of Her Majesty, was the sort of thing to be expected from “that singular mixture of the bully and coward” who held the position of U.S. secretary of state.
Palmerston’s blood was up, and that was always dangerous. The United States was acting like a banana republic as far as he was concerned. He recalled his own glory days of gunboat diplomacy. South American governments had often tried to avoid responsibility for some affront to British interests by claiming that Britain’s consuls should confine themselves to commercial functions and had no right to make demands, to which the response was usually that if the offending government did not want to hear from the consul, it would hear from a British admiral, “whose manner of dealing with such matters might be less agreeable.”
Palmerston prepared to send a naval squadron and thousands of fresh troops to Canada in case this dispute over Bunch was used as a pretext for widening hostilities. “No man with half an eye in his head, or half an idea in his brain,” he said, “could fail to perceive what a lowering of the position of England in the world would follow the conquest of our North American Provinces by the North Americans, especially after the Bull’s [sic] Run races. We must defend Canada; and to defend it, we must have troops there.”
Lord Russell joined the parade. “I quite agree with you about sending troops to Canada,” he said. But cooler heads in the cabinet warned that if a large number of troops were sent to Canada with little or nothing to do, there would be a very big problem with desertions. That gave Palmerston pause. And Lord Russell decided that if Seward would accept his word that no recognition of the Confederacy was contemplated, the storm could blow over. “If they do not quarrel about Bunch,” said Lord Russell, “we may rest on our oars for the winter.” But the U.S. secretary of state would not leave the Bunch affair alone, picking at it like a wound that he did not really want to heal.
—
SEWARD DID NOT revoke Bunch’s credentials right away, as he had threatened to do, and there were moments when he appeared to be softening. One day in mid-October he asked Lyons to stop by his office for a little chat. Seward had heard back from his envoy Charles Francis Adams in London. Lord John Russell had looked at the letters in the pouch. There was nothing in them treasonous or, indeed, of much interest—the usual missives from English governesses to their families and that sort of thing—certainly nothing that resembled incendiary communications from the inner circles around Jeff Davis. Seward had also gotten Lord Russell’s response to the demand that Robert Bunch be removed. Russell had refused. Whatever reservations the Foreign Secretary might have had about Bunch’s behavior, he had fully supported the mission to Richmond. Russell said flatly that Bunch was acting on instructions.
So Seward, watching the smoke from his cigar curl toward the ceiling, suggested it was time for the United States and Britain to put this “unfortunate affair of Mr. Bunch” behind them if they could. “I would like to find some way,” he said, “to escape from this notion that Great Britain communicating with the Confederate States about maritime rights is an unfriendly act. Let’s talk about this privately, shall we? And unofficially?”
Lyons, as usual, was happy to do so.
“Notwithstanding the language of the English press,” said Seward, “I believe neither your government’s ministers nor the leading members of their Liberal Party are unfriendly to the United States or have any desire to embarrass us in our operations against the South….But this damn Bunch affair has brought about the exact state of things I wanted to avoid.” He held up one of the dispatches from Adams. “Here is a plain official declaration to the United States minister in London, not only that your government recognized the Rebels as belligerents, but that it had entered into communication with the Rebel government. And you know it is extremely difficult, no, it is impossible for the United States to acquiesce in communications of this kind between foreign governments and the Rebels.”
Lyons said little and studied Seward closely. The secretary of state seemed to be taxing his ingenuity, looking for a way to avoid a fight with Britain, for once, but at the same time he didn’t want to lose his popularity among extremists in his party, and he didn’t want the public thinking he’d pusillanimously retreated from the high-sounding positions he’d adopted in August.
Now Seward adopted a conspiratorial tone. “I need to gain time,” he said. “In two months the whole business with the South will probably be finished. At any rate in two months the North will have possession of a cotton port, and we’ll open it for exports, and this will change the views of the European powers.”
Seward seemed to be very anxious. “It is all-important that I gain time,” he said again.
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, Lyons reported that Seward had returned, suddenly, “to his old ways,” and for no readily apparent reason. On October 26, Seward called Lyons to the State Department to inform him that he was withdrawing Bunch’s exequatur and to read to him the official message he was sending to London. Seward said he flatly rejected Britain’s claims that it had a right to communicate with Richmond as it had, and he wanted Bunch removed, he said, because of his known partisanship to the South.
“Never were serious charges brought upon a slighter foundation,” Lyons wrote in his official dispatch to Lord Russell. “No one who has read Mr. Bunch’s dispatches to Your Lordship and to me can consider him as in the least degree a partisan of the Southern cause.” Clearly, “Mr. Bunch has merely been selected as a safer object of attack than the British or French Government.”
“When Mr. Seward had finished reading the dispatch, I remained silent,” Lyons wrote. “I allowed the pain which the contents of it had caused me to be apparent in my countenance, but I said nothing. From my knowledge of Mr. Seward’s character, I was sure that at the moment nothing which I could say would make so much impression upon him as my maintaining an absolute silence. After a short pause, I took leave of him courteously, and withdrew.”
Privately, Lyons wrote that if Seward remained “in his present mood,” he would be glad to find a pretext for performing “other half-violent acts,” and “if he finds these acts popular and not too dangerous as far as England is concerned, he will probably play out the play and send me my passports”—that is, expel Lyons—“on the plea of some consul’s having communicated with the Southern government under instructions from me.” This performance by Seward, as Lyons put it, was “one more proof that we cannot depend on his prudence or his moderation; that we must always be prepared for an attack.”
The French were even more fed up than Lyons. Count Mercier was pressing for recognition of the Confederacy and the use of naval force to break the Federal blockade in order to get the cotton needed for French mills. Lyons pushed back. That sort of thing made no sense unless both countries were ready to go to war. He saw no alarm in England about cotton shortages. “On the contrary, men’s thoughts appear to be turned hopefully towards new sources of supply,” he told Mercier, “and there seems to be a very general opinion that if the momentary inconvenience is not very great indeed, it might be wise to endure it now, in order to be free in the future from the danger of depending so very much upon one country for an article of the greatest importance to us.”
Lyons told Mercier, “I do not think that either the government or the people in England are prepared for such extreme measures as recognizing the Confederates and breaking up the blockade.”
But if Seward continued his erratic, hostile behavior, that could change.
—
BUNCH, WITHOUT HIS exequatur and therefore without official standing as far as the Federal government was concerned, nonetheless remained in Charleston and continued to report, sometimes directly and sometimes over the signature of his deputy. But, really, nothing was the same. Even before his credentials were revoked, when a new diplomatic code was distributed, Hammond told Lyons that “Lord Russell will not give Bunch a cipher. The consul has done himself no good by the very lame explanation he has given respecting Mr. Mure; and you will see that he is now strictly prohibited from sending any private letter whatever under his official cover.”
Lyons continued to defend Bunch and to try to reassure him. But Bunch found his depression hard to shake. His position was increasingly vulnerable in an increasingly vulnerable city. The Union Navy mounted an enormous expedition that took Beaufort, giving it a solid base from which to patrol the lower Atlantic coast. The blockade was tightening, and no one could say when Charleston would come under direct attack.
Whatever Lyons said, Bunch felt that the Foreign Secretary wanted to be done with him, and he was right about that. When Lord Russell received word that Bunch’s exequatur had been revoked, he told Palmerston not to worry too much about it: “It is the business of Seward to feed the mob with sacrifices every day, and we happen to be the most grateful food he can offer.” In early December Russell told the American minister in London that he simply didn’t want to talk about the Bunch case anymore; he “did not perceive that any advantage would be obtained by the continuance of this correspondence.”
Seward and his agents, in their zeal to attack and neutralize Bunch, undermined everything he had done. They had had few better allies in the South, although they did not know it, and they had tried their best to destroy him. But Bunch’s long record of dispatches about the Southerners, their politics, their key personalities and especially their craving for new slaves from Africa had slowed London’s march toward recognition of the Confederacy. He had shaped and reinforced the skeptical reporting of William Howard Russell, which reflected so many of his own views, and he had provided a great deal of ammunition for Lyons to use in the continued fight to keep London neutral.
But the tensions raised by the “damn Bunch affair” did not subside. Seward’s handling of the matter had made him, in the eyes of the British cabinet, “the very impersonation of all that is most violent and arrogant in the American character.” And the possibility of war between the United States and the United Kingdom continued to loom like a thunderhead on the horizon. Any new incident could unleash the lightning.