IT WAS TIME FOR BUNCH to go. “The attack on Charleston is supposed to be imminent,” Lyons wrote to Earl Russell on January 23, 1863. “It is, of course, possible that it may be delayed or that the design may be altogether abandoned. Nevertheless, I think it prudent to withdraw Mr. Bunch at once.” Lyons did not want the Federal forces to find the consul there in “his present undefined position” without any recognized diplomatic cover, since his exequatur had been withdrawn more than a year before.
“I shall very much regret the loss of his valuable and interesting reports,” wrote Lyons. “I need not remind Your Lordship that Mr. Bunch has remained at his post during the unhealthy as well as the healthy seasons, since the breaking out of the Civil War,” Lyons said, making sure Earl Russell remembered that Bunch “has received Your Lordship’s commendations for the zeal and ability which he has manifested on several occasions during this trying time.”
On February 8, 1863, Robert Barnwell Rhett’s newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, reported that Robert Bunch, the British consul, had sailed from Charleston the day before in the British steamer Cadmus.
“It is said that, under the prospect of a formidable attack on Charleston, it would not be proper to expose the obnoxious Mr. Bunch, deprived of his official position, to the hostility of the Yankee forces,” the Mercury wrote, using the wordobnoxious ironically. By then the paper had concluded that Robert Bunch was a true friend of the South. “It seems more probable, however, that the real motive of his withdrawal is a desire on the part of Lord Lyons and of the British Administration to gratify the United States Government in the removal of Mr. Bunch, whose views and course have been more unprejudiced and just to the Confederate States than their own.” The italics are the Mercury’s. “We throw out these views which occur to us for whatever they may be worth. Every one must judge for himself.”
By early 1863 the North’s war machine was so enormous that both the British and the French had given up any thought of challenging it directly. In July 1863, when the Confederacy lost the Siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Gettysburg in the same week, the South’s last, extremely faint hopes of winning European recognition and support were ended. The Lost Cause was lost for good.
The people who had known Consul Bunch in Charleston would never be aware of the role he had played in defeating their plans for a slaveholding empire. They just kept on fighting, holding out against the Union siege month after month for another two years after Bunch departed. Federal forces would make many attempts to take the harbor by sea and to attack the peninsula by land. The very center of the city came in range of Union guns. What the fire of 1861 had not destroyed, artillery began to pick apart. The glamorous racecourse became a fetid prisoner-of-war camp for captured Union soldiers, and then the site of a mass grave for some two hundred of them. The Confederate garrison in Fort Sumter held out, its walls reduced to rubble that was then reinforced with seawater-soaked cotton bales. It was not until early 1865, as the Union Army under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman approached in its devastating “march to the sea,” that the defenses of Charleston finally were abandoned.
Robert Bunch, for his part, had been reassigned to Cuba, where he sat on the joint commission adjudicating slave-trade cases. Subsequently he was posted to Bogotá, Colombia, where he became Her Majesty’s minister plenipotentiary, the post he had wanted for many years.