ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 11, as the Union and Great Britain waged their tense, slow-motion, diplomatic battle over the Trent Affair, and just as the first anniversary of South Carolina’s secession approached, an enormous blaze cut a swath of destruction through the heart of Charleston. It started around ten o’clock in the evening, an hour after curfew, among some workshops and warehouses at the end of Hassell Street near the port. A stiff wind was coming in from the northeast, and the fire spread quickly, completely out of control, from one wood-frame building to another. All the militias and guards and fire companies that Charleston had organized to put out fires and put down rebellions (because the two were linked in the white Southerners’ nightmare visions) proved powerless to arrest the spreading conflagration. At low tide—and this was at dead low tide—there was not enough water at hand to begin to douse the flames. Within less than an hour the blaze had reached Institute Hall on Meeting Street, scene of the fatal disintegration of the Democratic Party and the euphoric ratification of the Ordinance of Secession the year before. The stage where Yancey had once electrified the crowds, as well as the paintings of half-nude nymphs above it, succumbed to the flames. Fire engulfed the map of Africa and the bowie knife that pointed the way there.
The blaze destroyed the Charleston Hotel and threatened the Mills House Hotel, where guests, including the visiting Gen. Robert E. Lee, poured into the street, sure they were about to die. But the fast-moving fire was moving on, and St. Andrew’s Hall on Broad Street was right in its path. Some brave Charlestonians—Britons, one assumes; royalists, without a doubt—rushed into the burning building to try to rescue the Sully portrait of the young Queen Victoria.
Perhaps Her Majesty’s man in Charleston was among them. But he does not mention the fire at all in the private letters to Lord Lyons that have survived. What we know is that Robert Bunch’s home and office on Meeting Street near the Battery were spared, but they were only a few hundred yards from the inferno that filled the air with choking smoke and incandescent cinders. The Great Fire, as it came to be called, was so intense that it was visible to Union warships miles out at sea, and in that long night of the conflagration the streets were scenes of almost complete chaos.
At dawn, the fire spent, a third of the city smoldered in ruins, and even though the fire had started by accident, it gave people a sense of the horrors that the future might hold in store. Already the Federal forces that had taken Beaufort in the Battle of Port Royal a month before were pushing up the coast through Edisto Island and attacking Rockville, near Kiawah Island.
Robert Bunch must have felt, looking at the shattered city where he had spent almost a quarter of his life, that everything he had worked for was coming apart. He had never been so cut off and so alone. Three days before the fire he had written a long, plaintive letter to Lyons.
“I can see that the impression prevailing at the Foreign Office is that I as a consul am giving myself the style of a quasi-minister—writing freely, expressing opinions and the like. My dispatches containing information which no one elsecould give are left unnoticed—not even acknowledged. In fact, I am to consider myself ‘snubbed’—if not worse.”
Because other consuls either produced little or had taken leave, at the height of the crisis Bunch had been the only representative of Her Majesty’s government in the whole of what he called “the Southern country.” For months, since about the time of the attack on Fort Sumter, rabble-rousers had incited the Southern public against “the foreign consuls,” who were seen as failing to recognize the independence of the Confederacy and perhaps as secret abolitionists as well.
“By ordinary management and common sense I have kept things as they were,” Bunch wrote to Lyons. “It is too long to explain how I have done this, but it has been in the main by conversation with influential persons and by representation of the impolicy of raising disagreeable questions.” He confessed that he had corresponded with the “state department” in Richmond, quite apart from the Trescot visit, and he had tried to help British ships trapped in the harbor that wanted to escape the blockade, which Lyons, in November, had said should be observed. But what else could he do? In the process, he said, he had been able to protect many British citizens and keep them from being drafted into the Rebel Army.
Lyons did not forward Bunch’s complaints to Lord Russell, and he warned Bunch that such letters would do him no good at the Foreign Office.
Still, Bunch remained in Charleston. He collected mail from other consuls as they resumed their posts, and he forwarded it on the British warships that now paid regular visits to pick up the correspondence. Bunch reported on the state of the harbor. Occasionally he even boarded British cruisers for a look at coastal operations and defenses and blockade operations. But his was no longer “a political office.”
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AT A CHRISTMAS ball in Washington, William Seward publicly told the Prince de Joinville, one of the French royals in town, that the effects of war between the United States and Great Britain would be terrible for everyone. William Howard Russell, who was there listening, heard Seward mouth the same threat he had made in one form or another many times before. “We will wrap the whole world in flame!” Seward said. There is “no power so remote that she will not feel the fire of our battle and be burned by our conflagration,” Seward proclaimed.
But this time W. H. Russell was not impressed. He quoted someone else at the party saying that when Seward talked that way, he meant to back down. In fact, President Lincoln had made it clear that he did not want this fight and that they had come far too close to it. “One war at a time,” he told his secretary of state.
The language offered by Prince Albert had left room for a face-saving response in Seward’s reply: Charles Wilkes had not been acting under orders. Three days after Christmas the correspondence of Seward and the British and French foreign ministers was published, announcing the release of the Confederate emissaries.
“The bubble has burst,” wrote William Howard Russell.
“Seward has cowered beneath the roar of the British lion and surrendered Mason and Slidell, who have been permitted to go on their errand to England.”
In Richmond, Judah P. Benjamin’s clerk wrote in his diary: “Now we must depend on our own strong arms and stout hearts for defense.”