THOSE WHO HAD FOUGHT LONG and hard for secession and the reopening of the slave trade with Africa brought the South nothing in the end but war, emancipation, economic ruination, and, finally, occupation by Northern troops. Some of them did not survive the fighting and others were broken along with their sinister dreams, but a few, arguably the most ruthless, managed to prosper and rebuild.
The Last Slavers
Timothy Meaher, who had constructed the Southern Republic to ply the waters of the Alabama River, and who had sent the Clotilda to bring the last cargo of African slaves known to land on the shores of the United States, concentrated on his lumber business after the end of the hostilities and amassed a sizable fortune before he died in 1892 at the age of eighty.
The people Meaher had imported to Alabama as slaves settled, after their emancipation, in a part of his estate just north of Mobile known ever since as Africatown. Several of them worked in Meaher’s sawmill. One of them, Cudjo Lewis, lived until 1935, the last known witness to the horrors of the Middle Passage.
Charles A. L. Lamar, the young hothead behind the Wanderer expedition, did not fare so well. During the war he devoted most of his efforts to blockade running, and he thought that the Wanderer, which he had refurbished at considerable expense, would serve nicely to outrun the Yankee navy. But the same Lt. Tunis Augustus MacDonough Craven who had captured the Wildfire captured the Wanderer off the Florida Keys soon after fighting began, and it was incorporated eventually into the Union Navy.
Lamar had also bought the former slave ship Bonita, and he joined forces with none other than Lt. John Newland Maffitt, the former nemesis of slavers who had captured the Echo. Maffitt had resigned from the Union Navy and committed himself to the Confederacy, in whose service he became known as “the Prince of the Privateers.”
Toward the end of the war, Lamar rejoined the land forces fighting last-ditch battles against the advancing Federal forces. Seven days after the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Lamar was shot and killed during a small battle in Columbus, Georgia. He was one of the last men to die fighting in the Civil War.
The slaver Echo, also known as the Putnam, which Maffitt had captured and which anchored in Charleston Harbor in the summer of 1858, became the centerpiece of a minor epic. It was bought at auction a few months after its capture and then, when the war began, commissioned as the privateer Jefferson Davis. In July 1861 it captured a merchant ship called the S. J. Waring and put a prize crew aboard who set their course for South Carolina. They told the black twenty-seven-year-old steward and cook, William Tillman, that he was now the property of the Confederate Navy and he’d be sold as a slave when the ship reached port.
As the Waring neared Charleston, Tillman waited until the Confederate officers were asleep or dozing, then killed three of them with a hatchet and took command of the schooner. The two surviving members of the prize crew were freed to help sail it, and eventually it managed to make its way back to New York, where Tillman found himself feted as a hero. The showman P. T. Barnum put him on display, and several months later the courts awarded Tillman $6,000 in prize money (roughly $150,000 today) for recapturing his ship. The Putnam/Echo/Jefferson Davis, for its part, ran aground a few weeks later off the Florida coast and had to be abandoned.
The Fire-Eaters
Robert Barnwell Rhett never did live up to his pretensions. South Carolina had heeded his call to secession and war, but, that accomplished, the Confederacy had little place for him. He had imagined himself its president but never rose higher than a seat in the lower house. As the war wore on, he lambasted the leadership of Jefferson Davis, as many people did, but few would have preferred Rhett in the Confederate president’s place.
Soon after the fighting began, people noticed what seemed at first merely an unsightly pimple on Rhett’s nose. It grew over the course of the war, and by the end of the 1860s was devouring his face. Doctors operated on him repeatedly, with all the horrors that surgery entailed in the middle of the nineteenth century, but they could not stop the cancer’s spread. By 1875, this man who had always been at once so plain-looking and yet so vain, considered himself too hideous to appear in public. He worked on a memoir, but it was never published in his lifetime. When the scholar William C. Davis was preparing the manuscript for academic publication 130 years later, he found a note that Rhett had scribbled down as a random thought: “In a strong man, Conceit is a weakness—in a weak man, strength.” As Davis put it, Rhett “left the stamp of his strengths, his weaknesses, and his conceit on the blighted fortunes of his generation and his South.”
Rhett died in 1876 at the age of seventy-five and was buried in what was at first an unmarked grave in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery. His family could not afford a monument. Later one was erected nearby with the family name alone, “Rhett,” the appellation that Mr. Smith had borrowed from his distant past, and that endures to the present.
Leonidas Spratt, forty-two years old when Sumter fell, was no longer quite the romantic young rabble-rouser he had been when Bunch first knew him and learned to loathe him. As war approached, Spratt had sold his newspaper, theCharleston Standard, to the Rhetts so he would have more time to give lectures, and when the fighting began, he became the Mercury’s correspondent on Virginia’s battlefield. After the first Battle of Bull Run, Spratt wrote almost in passing in one of his articles that as South Carolina’s Gen. Barnard Bee was trying desperately to rally his forces, he pointed to another officer and shouted at his terrified troops, “There is Jackson, standing like a stone-wall.” And thus the flamboyant Spratt is said to have given the ascetic Gen. Thomas Jackson the name that will forever be associated with him.
By the end of 1861, Spratt had taken up arms himself and eventually rose to the rank of colonel. He spent much of his long life after the war living in Jacksonville, Florida, a state he had gone to as an envoy from South Carolina and had persuaded, finally, to join the Confederacy. In his dotage, Spratt wrote several tomes that tried to reconcile—sometimes in quite incomprehensible prose—the kingdom of God and the observable facts of the natural universe. When he died in 1903 at the age of eighty-five, brief notices appeared as far afield as the Los Angeles Herald. “He advocated secession most strenuously,” read the obituary in California. There was no mention of the slave trade.
William Lowndes Yancey, who had electrified the Democratic convention in Charleston and played such an important role tearing down the party in order to tear apart the country, returned from his time as the Confederate envoy in Britain a bitterly disappointed man, and on a stop in New Orleans in March 1862 he shared his disillusionment with the public. “There was not a country in Europe which sympathized with us,” he said. Southerners had miscalculated the power of cotton to force Britain and France into the fight. It was a factor in world commerce, but King Cotton did not have “absolute sway,” Yancey told his audience. “We cannot look for any sympathy or help from abroad. We must rely on ourselves alone.”
Judah P. Benjamin was never known as a “fire-eater.” Indeed he was the most cultured and well-traveled man in the Confederate cabinet, the trusted right hand of Jefferson Davis, serving as secretary of state until the collapse of the rebel government. But Benjamin’s legalistic view of the African slave trade, that it was banned in the Confederate constitution and that that was as far as the government need go, deeply undermined what faint hope the rebellion had of gaining formal British recognition.
After Richmond fell and the cabinet fled, Benjamin was the only member to escape capture and imprisonment. He made his way to Florida, and eventually to London. Because Benjamin had been born in what were then the British Virgin Islands, he was able quickly to reclaim his British nationality. In short order the famous international litigator became a London barrister and a Queen’s Counsel and wrote important tomes on what would later be called corporate law. He had managed to preserve some of the fortune he had before the war, grew even richer afterward, and sent money to help support Varina Davis, a close friend and ally, while her husband, Jefferson Davis, was in Federal prison.
Benjamin never did return to the United States but divided his time between London and Paris, where his estranged wife and his grown daughter lived. He died in 1884, at age seventy-two, and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in a well-tended grave that bears the medallion of the Confederate States of America.
Bunch’s Circle
Among the people Bunch called the “better class” in Charleston, Alfred Huger was left broken by the war, in despair and in retreat until his death seven years later. The problematic William Henry Trescot, whose final allegiance was to the art of diplomacy, served on the staff of Col. Roswell Ripley in the brutal Virginia and Maryland campaigns of 1862, then in the South Carolina legislature while the war was winding down. And eventually Trescot went back to Washington. He was appointed to commissions negotiating with the Chinese and the Mexicans, served as the U.S. envoy to Chile, and was active almost until his death, at age seventy-five, in 1898.
The most important person by far for Bunch when he first moved to Charleston and long afterward was the distinguished lawyer and unrepentant Unionist James L. Petigru. But, as Thomas Butler Gunn learned when he visited him in 1861, even the paterfamilias of South Carolina’s legal and political elite was on the defensive as the state became, in Petigru’s famous phrase, a “lunatic asylum.”
Petigru, born in 1789, died in March 1863, shortly after Bunch departed and long before the Civil War ended, but certainly not before he could see where it was leading. “It is an odd feeling to be in the midst of joy and congratulations that one does not feel,” he said soon after the fighting started. “On the contrary, it is a feeling of deep sadness that settles on my mind. The universal applause that waits on secessionists and secession has not the slightest tendency to shake my conviction that we are on the road to ruin.” When the war was well over, and all was lost, his friend the poet William Grayson wrote a verse dedicated to Petigru that conceded, more with affection than with bitterness, that Petigru had been right from the beginning to listen to his intellect and not to the clamor of public opinion:
’Tis for this we render honor—
That he ranks among the few
Who, amid a reign of Error,
Dared sublimely to be true.
Petigru’s house in town had burned in the fire of 1861, and before he died his home on Sullivan’s Island was confiscated by the Confederate military fortifying Charleston Harbor. The epic defense of the city known as “the cradle of rebellion” was about to begin.
By the spring of 1863, the Union Navy had assembled the most powerful armada, in terms of raw firepower, that the world had ever seen. The British did not marshal as many guns and munitions at Sebastopol. But Charleston’s defenses were under Gen. Beauregard, who had returned to the city that loved him so well, and he had made it almost impregnable. At Fort Sumter, at Fort Moultrie, beyond it on Sullivan’s Island, and at other strategic sites around the harbor new batteries had been dug in. Mines were laid underwater, ropes were strung beneath the surface to snarl propellers, and the vaunted new ironclad navy of the Union, including seven ships modeled on the famous Monitor, soon discovered they were no match for the concentrated firepower of the Confederacy’s land-based guns. The artillery duels lasted for almost two years and foreshadowed the stalemate on the Western Front in World War I.
In military terms, the defense of Charleston was both brilliant and heroic. But the special fabric of Charleston’s society, its elegance and gentility, its pretensions and delusions, were frayed almost beyond recognition.
There was no general uprising of the slaves. Many were made to build the city’s new defenses. Others continued to serve their masters obediently, quietly. After one dinner party, Mary Chesnut marveled at “those old grey-haired darkies and their automatic, noiseless perfection of training.”
But there were many incidents, some of them spectacular, that deepened the fears of Charleston’s white elite. In May 1862 a slave who served as a harbor pilot, Robert Smalls, sailed the steam-powered ship the Planter out of the harbor and into the hands of the blockading fleet. He put himself and the boat at the disposal of the Union Navy for the rest of the war.
Former slaves who had escaped to the North enlisted by the thousands in the ranks of specially formed Union regiments. Their first great test in battle came when they tried to storm the Wagner Battery on Morris Island just south of Sumter in July 1863. Six thousand men mounted the charge, and 1,500 died, including Union Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the Massachusetts 54th, a black regiment. When the Union forces retreated, the Confederate officers, some of whom had known him personally, refused to return his body or treat it with any military honor. Shaw’s corpse was stripped of its uniform and thrown into a ditch, as the Charleston press said, “with his niggers.”
The vindictiveness of the battle for a city whose importance
had become mainly symbolic did little credit to either side. The Confederate Army had been defeated already at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. New Orleans had long since fallen to Federal troops. Charleston Harbor was closed by a wall of Union warships. The city, cut off from the world, was dying from within. And yet, when the North managed to bring its artillery close enough to reach the southern part of Charleston—the elegant part where Bunch and all the “better class” had their homes, and where all the history of secession had been written—President Lincoln himself gave the order to bombard it with incendiary shells.
Still, the city held on.
Jefferson Davis visited Charleston in November 1863 and stood on the steps of City Hall amid buildings destroyed by fire and never rebuilt, looking out on homes deserted by their inhabitants and the steeple of St. Michael’s Church, eventually painted black so it would be less useful for Yankee gunners setting their sights. He declared it would be better for the city to become a “heap of ruins” than for it to fall to the Yankees.
“Ruins!” the crowd answered back. “Ruins!”
By late 1864, with the defenses still holding out as if by miracle, but with the Union forces of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marching through Georgia to the sea, there had settled on Charleston a kind of fin du monde frenzy. Parties were thrown at which people sang psalms until midnight, then struck up a band and danced until dawn.
In the end, Sherman the ruthless realist decided the jewel of the South was not worth taking. “Charleston,” he told Grant, “is now a mere desolated wreck, and it is hardly worth the time it would take to starve it out.”
In early February 1865, just over two years after Bunch had left Charleston, Confederate troops abandoned the city. On February 18, occupying Federal forces, including black regiments, marched in. By April 14, five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and four years after Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter, a great event was staged. Anderson, now a gray and weary colonel, once again raised the flag of the United States above Sumter’s shattered walls. If he had had his wishes, he said, he would have done it in silence. Among the honored guests: the son of Denmark Vesey.
The feeling of jubilation in the North was short-lived. On that same night, President Lincoln was assassinated. But for the utterly defeated white elite of Charleston, who had thought they must start a war to escape Lincoln’s rule, that was little consolation. Bunch’s secret prediction six years before had come true: the prestige and power of these slaveholders was gone, never to return.
One of Charleston’s distinguished matrons wrote years later that when she went into the heart of the city, which had become a lawless no-man’s-land by 1865, roofs were shattered and chimneys crumbling, and no windows remained: “The streets looked as if piled with diamonds, the glass lay shivered so thick on the ground.”
Bunch and the Ministers
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, lived to see the end of the American Civil War but not the definitive end of the slave trade. It endured in Africa and up into Arabia until 1877, officially, and along clandestine routes well into the twentieth century. In 1865, Palmerston was elected once again as Prime Minister, but he came down with a fever after contracting a chill in an open carriage. He was two days shy of his eighty-first birthday, and it is said, apocryphally but appropriately, that his last words were, “Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do.”
Earl Russell (formerly Lord John Russell) was there to take Palmerston’s place but served for only eight months. Unable to hold his government together, he retired from his post and, to all intents and purposes, from public life.
Lord Clarendon returned as Foreign Secretary during Russell’s brief tenure as Prime Minister, and then again from late 1868. When Clarendon died in the summer of 1870, it was said, he was still surrounded by dossiers from the far-flung corners of the world where Her Majesty had pressing interests.
Lord Lyons left Washington for good at the end of 1864 suffering from mental and physical exhaustion and, after a tour at the Divine Port overseeing Britain’s relations with the Ottoman Empire, he was assigned to Paris as the ambassador. This was, from London’s point of view, the most important diplomatic position in the Foreign Service. Lyons served there through twenty years of extraordinary tumult, weathering the Franco-Prussian War, the collapse of the French Empire, the rise of the Commune, its elimination, and the aftermath. While Lyons was ambassador, England and France had a ferocious falling-out over which country would dictate the future of Egypt. (The banks of the Nile had grown very rich growing cotton when the Confederacy’s white gold was off the market; but the Egyptian rulers spent more than they earned, and the Europeans collected their debts.) Toward the end of Lyons’s twenty years he was offered the position of Foreign Secretary. He was, he said, simply too tired to take it.
As for the last years of Robert Bunch spent in Colombia and Venezuela, they brought with them the coveted title of minister, but left him once again on the far fringes of London’s field of vision.
As the interminable partisan wars of Latin America erupted, subsided, and erupted again, Bunch continued to try to travel throughout his area of responsibility, but he appears to have developed a condition, possibly prostate cancer, that made riding on horses or donkeys over long distances excruciatingly painful.
A smug official in the Foreign Office described Bunch as “a man spoilt by being raised beyond his proper sphere, and consequently too much impressed with a sense of his own dignity,” but Bunch did his best to maintain his sense of justice and of irony right up until his death in 1881. Bunch had helped to change the course of history; he had fought secretly but relentlessly against the cruel lunacy of slavery that surrounded him and that threatened to drag the wide world into America’s war; he had defended the humanity of black men and women who were treated no better than animals. And yet he, Robert Bunch, had been forgotten. A little respect for his dignity did not seem, to him, too much to ask.