LETTERS AND DISPATCHES

Most of Our Man in Charleston was developed from the unpublished private correspondence of Robert Bunch with various ministers in Washington and foreign secretaries in London. These letters are in several different collections, which are organized in different ways.

The official correspondence is held at the British National Archives in Kew. Of particular importance are those dispatches and letters related to consular and diplomatic affairs in “America,” which are filed under the heading FO5, and those related to “Slave Trade,” which are filed under FO84. Numbers are then assigned to specific volumes. So, for instance, Bunch’s rich correspondence in 1854 with Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, can be found under FO5/601. Bunch’s dispatches and letters concerning the cases of the slave ships Echo and Wanderer in 1858 can be found in FO84/1059.

Generally speaking, the letters in these bound volumes at Kew begin with the responses of the foreign secretary and his office to various dispatches, arranged chronologically, then proceed with the dispatches from the various consulates, grouped by location and put into chronological order, and within that context they are most easily searched by date.

The private correspondence is in several different collections, most of which have not been catalogued in detail.

Bunch’s correspondence with Sir Henry Bulwer, minister to Washington from 1849 to 1852, is held in the Norfolk Records Office, Norfolk, United Kingdom, as part of the Diplomatic Papers of William Henry Lytton Earle Bulwer, Baron Dalling and Bulwer, mostly under the filing code BUL 1.

Correspondence with Sir John Fiennes Crampton, secretary of legation at Washington from 1845 to 1852 and minister at Washington from 1852 to 1856, is held at Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Special Collections, much of it on microfilm.

Bunch’s extensive private and confidential correspondence with Lord Lyons, the British minister at Washington from 1858 to 1864, is in the Duke of Norfolk Archives at Arundel Castle in Arundel, West Sussex, United Kingdom. This trove of documents, held in the castle’s “Archive Tower,” was essential to the research. It is organized by the writers of the letter and by date in little bundles tied with ribbons. Correspondence from Lyons to others is contained in Lyons’s “Letter Books,” arranged chronologically. In the endnotes to this volume, all relevant correspondence from the Duke of Norfolk’s collection is cited as Lyons Papers.

Collections of published correspondence include:

Barnes, James J., and Patience P. Barnes. The American Civil War Through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplomats. 3 vols. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003–2005. This is an indispensable reference work.

———. Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844–67. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1993. Not as complete as British Eyes, but the correspondence from the period when Lord Napier was minister to Washington was particularly useful.

The Executive Documents of the Senate of the United States for the First Session of the Forty-First Congress, 1869, “Claims Against Great Britain.” Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870. This volume, published in various guises, has a wide range of correspondence to and from British officials.

Temperley, Harold, and Lillian M. Penson. Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902), or Documents, Old and New. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Reproduces several gems.

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. U.S. War Department, Official Records, particularly Series II, Vol. II: “Treatment of Suspected and Disloyal Persons North and South.” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897.

SELECTED BOOKS

There exist likely tens of thousands of books about the American Civil War, and hundreds were consulted in the research for Our Man in Charleston. A few of those that proved particularly helpful even when, in some cases, they came to conclusions different from mine were:

U.S.-U.K. Relations Before and During the American Civil War

Adams, Ephraim Douglass. Great Britain and the American Civil War. Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2006. Reprint of the original 1925 Longmans, Green and Co. edition. This has long been the defining work on the subject.

Berwanger, Eugene H. The British Foreign Service and the American Civil War. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Professor Berwanger is one of the very few scholars to have examined closely Robert Bunch’s private correspondence and to have understood how hostile to the South and slavery the consul really was.

Bonham, Milledge L., Jr., The British Consuls in the Confederacy. New York: Columbia University, 1911. This was accepted for many years as the definitive work on the subject. Unfortunately, Bonham does not appear to have had access to Bunch’s private correspondence. As a result, even though this volume is cited frequently by other scholars, its interpretations can be misleading.

Crook, D. P. The North, the South, and the Powers. London: John Wiley & Sons, 1974.

De Leon, Edwin. Secret History of Confederate Diplomacy Abroad. Edited by William C. Davis. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1976. Also see Ferris’s, The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1977).

Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2010. Published in the United States as A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. A wonderfully detailed account focused on the war years.

Jenkins, Brian. Britain and the War for the Union. Vol. 1. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974.

Jones, Howard. Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Also see Jones’s earlier Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Jordan, Donaldson, and Edwin J. Pratt. Europe and the American Civil War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Mahin, Dean B. One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999.

Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2008.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence. King Cotton Diplomacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Antebellum Developments in Historical Perspective

Catton, Bruce. The Coming Fury. New York: Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1961.

Egerton, Douglas R. Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought On the Civil War. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Franklin, John Hope. The Militant South: 1800–1861. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Originally published in 1956 by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion. Vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Also see Freehling’s Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina 1816–1836(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Goodheart, Adam. 1861: The Civil War Awakening. New York: Vintage, 2011.

Holt, Michael F. The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

Klein, Maury. Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Oates, Stephen B. The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820–1861. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. Rev. ed. New York: Dover, 1960. Original published in 1933 by Covici, Friede.

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. The Course of the South to Secession: An Interpretation. Edited by E. Merton Coulter. New York: D. Appleton, 1939.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861. Completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Harper, 1976.

Renehan, Edward J. The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Antebellum Impressions by Contemporary Witnesses

Cairnes, John Elliott. The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862.

Mary Chesnut Diaries: Chesnut, Mary Boykin. Mary Chesnut’s Diary. New York: Penguin Books, 2011; Daniels, Martha M., and Barbara E. McCarthy. Mary Chesnut’s Illustrated Diary. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2011; Vann Woodward, C., ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981; Vann Woodward, C., and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds. The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. London: Chapman & Hall, 1913. Originally published in 1850 and currently available online as a Project Gutenberg eBook. The critique of slavery and its impact on American culture in the North as well as the South is angry and unrelenting, and many times in the Bunch correspondence the consul seems to be echoing Dickens.

Gunn, Thomas Butler. Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries, 1849–1863. 22 vols. St. Louis: State Historical Society of Missouri, 2013. A fascinating resource, available online at http://www.historyhappenshere.org/archives/7354.

Halstead, Murat B. Caucuses of 1860: A History of the National Political Conventions of the Current Presidential Campaign. Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster and Company, 1860.

Jones, J. B. A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866.

Malet, William Wyndham. An Errand to the South in the Summer of 1862. London: Richard Bentley, 1863.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. Edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger. New York: Knopf, 1962.

Ranken, George. Canada and the Crimea, or Sketches of a Soldier’s Life. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863.

Thornbury, Walter. Criss-Cross Journeys. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1873. Reprint, Historical Collection from the British Library.

Turnbull, Jane M. E., and Marion Turnbull. American Photographs. London: T. C. Newby, 1859. Reprint, Historical Collection from the British Library.

Slavery and the Slave Trade

Bancroft, Frederic. Slave Trading in the Old South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Originally published by J. H. Furst, 1931.

Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Calonius, Erik. The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

Diouf, Sylviane A. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Diouf was also kind enough to share with me some of her original documentation.

Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery. Completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Huzzey, Richard. Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Joyner, Charles. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Metaxas, Eric. Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007.

Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.

Rees, Siân. Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade. London: Vintage, 2009.

Sinha, Manisha. The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Soodalter, Ron. Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader. New York: Washington Square Press, 2006.

Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Takaki, Ronald T. A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade. New York: The Free Press, 1971. A very important and enlightening study.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Wells, Tom Henderson. The Slave Ship Wanderer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967.

BIOGRAPHIES BY SUBJECT

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, and the Prince of Wales

Radforth, Ian. Royal Spectacle: The 1860 Visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Ridley, Jane. The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince. New York: Random House, 2013.

Weintraub, Stanley. Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

Edward Archibald, Consul in New York

Archibald, Edith J. Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald: A Memoir of Fifty Years of Service. Toronto: George N. Morang, 1924.

Judah P. Benjamin, Member of the Confederate Cabinet

Butler, Pierce. Judah P. Benjamin. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1906.

Evans, Eli N. Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate. New York: The Free Press, 1988. An interesting look at Benjamin from a modern Jewish perspective.

Meade, Robert Douthat. Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Reprinted from the original 1943 Oxford University Press edition. I find this to be the most thorough and convincing of the biographies of Benjamin.

James Buchanan, U.S. President

Baker, Jean H. James Buchanan. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Succinct and straightforward.

John Brown, Abolitionist and Insurgent

Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. New York: Henry Holt, 2011. Of the many, many Brown biographies, this certainly is one of the most compelling.

Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, and His Wife, Varina Davis

Cashin, Joan E. First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Davis, William C. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Andrew Jackson, President of the United States

Meacham, Jon. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random House, 2008. Especially good on the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s.

Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. This has become the reference point for most public discussion of the Lincoln administration.

Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Holzer, Harold. Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. A particularly useful look at this pivotal address that defines so well the issues of slavery and the slave trade.

Lord Lyons, British Minister to Washington

Jenkins, Brian. Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.

Newton, Lord. Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy. London: Edward Arnold, 1913.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Author and Landscape Architect

Rybczynski, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister of Great Britain

Ashley, Evelyn. The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple Viscount Palmerston. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1879.

Brown, David. Palmerston: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. The definitive work to date.

Robert Barnwell Rhett, Owner of the Charleston Mercury and Impassioned Secessionist

Davis, William C. Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

———, ed. A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

William Howard Russell, British War Correspondent

Crawford, Martin, ed. William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Hankinson, Alan. Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of the Times. London: Heinemann, 1982.

Russell, William Howard. My Diary North and South. Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863. Reprinted on demand in 2011 by Blackwell Books, London.

William Henry Seward, Secretary of State in the Lincoln Administration

Bancroft, Frederic. The Life of William H. Seward. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900.

Hale, Edward Everett. William H. Seward. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, 1910.

Seward, Olive Risley, ed. William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873.

Stahr, Walter. Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Taylor, John M. William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

John Slidell, Louisiana Political Boss and Confederate Delegate to Paris

Willson, Beckles. John Slidell and the Confederates in Paris (1862–65). New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1932. This little volume is highly readable but poorly sourced.

William Makepeace Thackeray, Famous Nineteenth-Century Novelist and Networker

Crowe, Eyre. With Thackeray in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893.

Monsarrat, Ann. Thackeray: An Uneasy Victorian. London: Cassell, 1980.

Denmark Vesey, Leader of a Planned Slave Rebellion in South Carolina in 1822

Robertson, David. Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Charles Wilkes, the U.S. Naval Officer Who Nearly Started a War with the United Kingdom

Wilkes, Charles. Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798–1877. Edited by William James Morgan et al. Washington, D.C.: Naval History Division, Department of the Navy, 1978.

On Charleston and the South

McInnis, Maurie D. The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Racine, Philip N., ed. Gentlemen Merchants: A Charleston Family’s Odyssey, 1828–1870. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008. A compilation of letters that give a particularly vivid and personal picture of Charleston during the standoff over Fort Sumter.

Rosen, Robert N. Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People During the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

The South’s Peculiar Manifest Destiny

Brown, Matthew. Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006.

Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

May, Robert E. Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Also see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002; originally published in 1973 by Louisiana State University Press).