THROUGH THE WINTER OF 1854–1855 the denizens of John Russell’s bookshop could read, battle by battle, the vivid accounts of the Crimean War published in the Times of London. Its correspondent, who also happened to be named Russell—William Howard Russell—applauded the British soldiers’ phenomenal bravery and exposed the British high command’s inexcusable incompetence. In the chill Carolina afternoons that December, with light flooding in through the windows of the bookshop, the men of Charleston read and discussed Russell’s account of a disastrous charge into the mouths of Russian cannons: “At ten minutes past eleven, our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced….At thirty-five minutes past eleven, not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those bloody Muscovite guns.”
Queen Victoria’s soldiers had gotten used to fighting “little wars” all over the globe, many of them simultaneously. But this was a big one, and Britain had to redeploy resources from around the world. As its warships gathered in the Black Sea around Sebastopol, the waters around the mouth of the Congo River and the Bight of Benin were neglected, and any lapse of surveillance and enforcement was exploited. The slave traffic between Africa and Cuba once again began to increase dramatically, to the point where Parliament began to question whether the Royal Navy’s Africa Squadron was worth the fortune expended on it each year. One of its former commanders told the House of Commons, “Experience hasproven the present system to be futile.”
The dispatches arriving at the Slave Trade Department meanwhile showed that the Americans and their flag continued to play a growing role in the deadly commerce between Africa and Cuba. A typically detailed report from the consul in Havana in October 1854 traced the movements of one Don José Egea, who was traveling to New York City to purchase a schooner “capable of bringing over 500 slaves from Africa.” The intelligence gathered on him gave the address of the offices he planned to visit and the precise coordinates where he was supposed to anchor near the mouth of the Congo River. The Foreign Office’s man in Havana said he hoped that officers of the U.S. government could be found “who will know that it is necessary to observe the greatest secrecy and discretion so as to trace Mr. Egea and watch his progress, in order to pounce upon the expedition at the moment of its completion.”
Lord Palmerston, languishing at the Home Office but always in close touch with Lord Clarendon, found these sorts of communications infuriating. The intelligence was there; the enforcement was not. “In Cuba, when our consul sends proofs to the Captain General that a cargo of slaves has been landed at such a time and place, and calls upon him to punish the offenders, the Captain General says he will make inquiries, and after a certain time he reports that he has made inquiries, and is unable to trace any proof that a landing has been effected; and when he is requested to search certain plantations to which it is suspected the slaves have been removed, he replies that he has not the power to do so.” As for the Americans, the fact that so much of this trade took place on ships flying their colors was, purely and simply, the “prostitution of their flag.”
Then word leaked that three U.S. envoys in Europe—Pierre Soulé, the minister in Madrid (a very “peculiar man,” as Crampton called him, with emphasis); James Buchanan, the envoy to London (widely known as “Buck” or “Old Buck”); and John Y. Mason, the minister to Paris—had all come together at what was supposed to be a secret meeting in the seaside resort of Ostend, Belgium. The “manifesto” that emerged called for the purchase of Cuba or, failing that, the use of force to seize it. Still, the British, struggling as they were in the mud of the Crimea, could do little to respond except to lodge diplomatic protests.
As these tensions and frustrations rose, Robert Bunch, wise to the ways of the society around him and of the bureaucracy he served—and now the father of a baby girl—tried to keep his head down. But other consuls were not so prudent.
The army in the Crimea cried out for volunteers, and Bunch’s old bête noir, Col. George Mathew, now in Philadelphia, wrote to the Foreign Office suggesting it should give consuls the authority to buy tickets to Britain for American doctors and others who wanted to volunteer for service in the Crimea. John Crampton, in Washington, didn’t like this idea at all. The closer he looked at the would-be cannon fodder Mathew was lining up, the less savory the project appeared. Many supposed volunteers were simply looking for a quick buck in a faltering American economy. Crampton checked with his lawyers, who told him that any arrangement that recruited anyone on U.S. soil for the war against Russia was not only illegal but would be breaking the same neutrality law that was used by the Federal government, when it chose, to try to stop the filibusters in the Caribbean.
Still, Crampton hoped to please London. He tried to find a way to fund volunteers headed for the Crimea, using money from his Secret Service account. He corresponded confidentially with several agents, usually by special messenger because he didn’t trust the mails, and they set up a network that would encourage Americans to go to Canada, then enlist. Old Anthony Barclay—Bunch’s cousin, who was the consul in New York—got dragged into the recruitment conspiracy. (He would later claim it was his clerk in his back-alley office who made all the decisions, that he knew nothing about them.) Soon the whole scheme had leaked to the press and suddenly became part of a widening crisis.
Complicating U.S.-British relations still further, the American adventurer William Walker had taken an armed gang to Nicaragua, thrown his weight behind one of the political factions, and was emerging as a yanqui dictator in the heart of Central America. Newspapers called him “the grey-eyed man of destiny,” as in “Manifest Destiny.” Many admirers in the United States saw Walker striking a blow for their country, for slavery, and against the Crown, which presumed to limit their territorial ambitions.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Minister Crampton and his consuls came to believe that American politicians were stirring up war fever to help pull together the increasingly divided “united” states that were unable to resolve their bitter differences over slavery. Crampton was particularly suspicious of the new Republican Party that had grown out of the Free Soil Party, and of its leader, Senator William Seward of New York. These men saw “a foreign war,” as Crampton wrote, “being the great cure for the black disease which is now tearing the vitals of the Union.”
All this talk of violent conflict with Great Britain, month after month, grated on Bunch’s nerves in Charleston, threatened his family’s interests in the North (where Emma owned some properties), and threw into his face the contradictions of his position. He could not say what he felt nor dare to feel what he said. “Really, the temptation to speak one’s mind to somebody is irresistible,” he wrote. “As the tyrant in the melodrama says, whilst biting his gauntlet, ‘But I must dissemble’—so I am forced to wear the smile of indifference.”
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IN LONDON, LORD Palmerston was now Prime Minister. It had taken him a lifetime to reach the top position—he was seventy-one years old—but he was still remarkably fit, despite the hair dye and false teeth, and he still showed the kind of energy and determination that the British hungered for after a long year and a half sunk in the Crimean mire. Palmerston’s well-known force of personality, his almost insouciant imperialism, and his promiscuous use of British arms brought confidence to the home front and encouragement to the war front. His decision to keep Clarendon as Foreign Secretary also lent the new administration an air of confident continuity.
As Palmerston focused his energies on the war against the Russians, the truculent Americans seemed like little more than a nuisance, and he pondered ways to strike back at them, if necessary, on the cheap. In a hasty but revealing note to Lord Clarendon, Palmerston called the Americans “mere swaggering bullies.” If they “should push matters to extremities, we should be quite able to meet them,” he scrawled. Were they afraid of a huge slave insurrection? Then Britain could perfectly well give them one. “We have a deeply piercing blow to strike at their Southern States if ever we should be at war with them,” wrote Palmerston. “Freedom to the Slaves proclaimed by a British force landed in the South would shake the Union to its base.”
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ROBERT AND EMMA and little Helen Bunch were now well established in Charleston society. Such were the interlocking kinships among the Mannings and the Hamptons, the Blakes and the Rutledges, the Allstons, the Chesnuts, the Pinckneys, and others that acceptance in one circle could lead to acceptance in many. Bunch was invited to dinners and Emma to teas, where she listened as closely to the opinions of the ladies as Robert did to those of the men. But even as the young consul’s many personal connections helped keep him informed, they also made it hard for him to reconcile the elite that he cultivated with the slavery he hated. The discrepancy between the sentiments he expressed to his government and the sentiments he expressed in Charleston society grew wider by the day. The smile of indifference became his habitual expression.
Most problematic of all was Bunch’s relationship with Daniel Blake, who owned as many slaves or more than anyone else on the Eastern seaboard. When Bunch first met him, Blake was recently widowed. Then Emma’s younger sister, Helen Craig, came to visit Charleston, and Blake fell for her. Within a year they were married. Helen was thirty, and, like Emma, she was petite with dark hair, thin lips, and intelligent, worldly eyes. Blake was fifty-three but, at the time, looked younger. He was almost gaunt and had the mien of an ascetic country preacher, which shouldn’t have been surprising, since he was almost as famous for his piety as he was for his fortune.
Blake was from an old Anglo-American family that had lived in South Carolina since the seventeenth century yet never lost entirely its connection to Great Britain. He was born in England and educated at Cambridge. But he was as deeply embedded in the slave economy of the South as anyone alive. His properties included huge rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina. The main one was called, simply, Board House. And he had a summer retreat called The Meadows that covered almost eight thousand acres near the Count de Choiseul’s relatively modest “chateau” in the North Carolina mountains.
Blake came to think of Bunch as a close member of his family and eventually named his new bride’s firstborn son Robert Bunch Blake, suggesting that the never-very-pious consul had put on enough religious airs to become the boy’s godfather. Certainly Cousin Helen had played the card of piety. In the little town of Hendersonville, North Carolina, near The Meadows a church was erected in the name of both Helen and Daniel Blake. But neither of the Craig women, Emma Bunch nor Helen Blake, was inclined to hold her tongue, and neither one of them accepted entirely the self-satisfied “slavocracy” around them. Even after the war had begun, when one of Blake’s sons by his first marriage was serving as a Confederate officer, Helen remained an outspoken Unionist.
For Bunch, the passion of these women so close to him eventually became a serious problem, but he could hardly fail to sympathize in private. In 1855 and 1856, even as Helen’s wedding approached, Bunch took a morbid fascination in the runaway-slave advertisements carried by the local papers, which marked such a contrast with the holier-than-holy posture of planters like Blake. Bunch sent the clippings off to Crampton almost randomly:
STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, Sampson County: Whereas D.W. Cromartie has this day made oath before us, John R. Ezzell and George W. Atkins aforesaid, that his Negro girl, ROSE, absconded from his service sometime in the month of June last, and is lurking about in the neighborhood of South River, or Cape Fear, committing acts of depredation and felony contrary to law. In consideration of which the said girl is hereby commanded to come forward and deliver herself up immediately, otherwise we hereby authorize any person to kill said girl without any fear of punishment….Said girl is about 18 years old, of black complexion and about five feet high.” Then there is an addendum from Cromartie: “I will pay Twenty-Five Dollars reward for the delivery of said girl, ROSE, to me in Clinton, either dead or alive, and a further reward of One Hundred Dollars for sufficient proof to convict any white person of harboring her.
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FOR ALL ROBERT BUNCH’S growing cynicism and fatalism about the slave society he inhabited, he remained relentless in pursuit of a resolution to the Negro Seamen law. And despite the many setbacks, Lord Clarendon continued to praise Bunch’s handling of the issue: “I feel certain that no effort on your part has been wanting.” Then, over the course of the spring, much to Bunch’s surprise, the new governor of the state gave him hope that the law might yet be changed.
The consul’s initial report on the election of Gen. James Hopkins Adams had not been optimistic. He was from “the interior of the state” and is “little known in Charleston,” Bunch told Clarendon. He portrayed Adams, essentially, as a yokel and did not expect him to support the kind of humane recommendations Governor Manning had approved. But when Adams visited Charleston in early March 1855, Bunch quickly arranged to meet him and propose “in a temperate and friendly manner,” as he had done with so many others so many times, the need to change a law that was a problem for Britain and was no longer required for the safety of South Carolina. Adams, far from resisting the arguments, said he was “fully impressed with the importance of the subject” and said he felt that public attitudes about it were changing. He wouldn’t commit on the issue, but he did ask Bunch to write him a formal letter about it.
This was a touchy proposal. Formal letters written by Consul Mathew had paved the way to diplomatic disaster. Bunch told Clarendon he thought it was worth doing, but only if the text of the letter was approved by Clarendon himself. Then, in June, Adams invited Bunch up to his Live Oak Plantation on the Congaree River near Columbia, where he seemed to be “conciliatory in the highest degree.” Bunch read the Clarendon-approved draft letter aloud to the governor, adding that he, the British consul, would take personal responsibility for changing anything in the text approved by the Foreign Secretary that Adams thought might “excite an unpleasant feeling.” He also told the governor that the letter was meant for his “information and guidance,” not for public consumption. Adams agreed to keep it private and said there wasn’t a word in it he’d want to change.
Bunch was as pleased as he was surprised by the whole encounter, which seemed to be the beginning of the end of the Negro Seamen Act. “General Adams has always been known as one of the leaders of the high Slavery Party, uniformly opposed to any negotiation on the subject of this obnoxious law,” Bunch reported to Clarendon. To have won out over this man’s prejudices was, Bunch suggested, a “triumph.”
Indeed, Bunch apparently felt so relieved that he spent an extra two days at Adams’s plantation, allowing himself to endure the hospitality of the master and his slaves.
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IN THE CRIMEA, Sebastopol had fallen in September 1855, and by early 1856 Lord Clarendon was in France personally negotiating the Treaty of Paris that would bring the war to an end. The parties then followed up with a declaration respecting maritime law that seemed, at the time, to have very little to do with South Carolina or Consul Bunch’s mission there. The signatories of the declaration were all the great powers of Europe: the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Sardinia (which controlled much of Italy), Austria, Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and Prussia. These were followed in rapid succession by forty-eight other countries but not, as it happened, the United States, which seemed, at just that moment, intent once again upon picking a fight with the British Empire.
President Franklin Pierce had devoted the first three thousand words of his eleven-thousand-word State of the Union address to grievances against Great Britain, from its claims on Belize and the Mosquito Coast in Central America to the recruiting of troops for the Crimea and border disputes with Canada in the Pacific Northwest. It all just confirmed Bunch’s generally gloomy assessment of Anglo-American relations. The consul said he was watching “anxiously out to windwards for an approaching squall.”
Bunch started to make the rounds of his Charleston contacts to test their sentiments. His message for each of them was the same: “You and nine-tenths of the respectable people of South Carolina look upon a war between the United States and Great Britain as a chimera—a bugbear to control an election—but an impossibility in fact.” The sooner they got over that idea, the better, Bunch told them. They should be doing everything they could to calm the waters and encourage peace, because war was a very real possibility.
“My friends really seemed greatly alarmed and equally astonished,” Bunch wrote to Crampton. “To them a war, or even a rupture, could be ruinous—the cotton and rice crop of last season are not paid for, and of course they would have no orders for the next.”
At a dinner party in Charleston, Bunch found himself up against a Mr. William Watts Sherman of the New York banking firm of Duncan, Sherman, & Company, “a finicking specimen of the money-changer turned dandy, pert, presumptuous, and a parvenu.” At the end of the meal, the ladies rose and left, and Sherman turned on Bunch. “What do you say to the Central America question?”
The matter was fraught with complex hostilities as London and Washington tried to negotiate a new treaty recognizing each other’s interests in Nicaragua, or not. Bunch intended his reply to end the conversation. “Really, Mr. Sherman, I do not think it is a question to talk about at all just now.”
But Sherman kept at it. “I presume you have read the correspondence between the two governments,” he said. “I have no hesitation in saying that the question is a vastly more complicated one than you suppose.” Sherman talked about his exalted position in finance and his close friendship with Secretary of State William L. Marcy, which enabled him to say that the government of the United States would never budge from the position it had taken opposing British claims to a protectorate on the Mosquito Coast that would give it effective control over any effort to build a trans-isthmus canal. Bunch repeated more or less what he’d said to his friends, with “perfect good humor and with the sweetest smiles,” essentially: “You may look on this as a ploy to win your elections, but Great Britain is not going to back down, and you could get yourself into a war.”
“Lord Clarendon is pettifogging,” said Sherman, suggesting that the Foreign Secretary was just quibbling about little details.
“Lord Clarendon can bear that imputation with Christian fortitude,” said Bunch. “When such a term is applied to the behavior of England, it has the merit of novelty and would have to be supported by some stronger evidence than your word, Mr. Sherman, for even the American public to believe it.”
Bunch’s blood was up. In the days that followed, encouraged by Crampton, he tried to create a wider campaign of information and persuasion that would show Charlestonians and Southerners generally that Britain should not be trifled with. He wrote to William Mure, who’d been the British consul in New Orleans for decades. Bunch presented himself in the letter as acting on Crampton’s behalf because Crampton was so busy. What he probably could not say was that Crampton, under pressure because of the Crimean recruiting scandal, was increasingly paranoid about his communications being monitored. The minister in Washington apparently thought he might get a letter to Bunch in Charleston unopened, but not as far as Mure in New Orleans. In any case, Bunch told Crampton he wasn’t too optimistic about Mure’s response: “M is a touchy sort of customer and might object to the appearance of my giving him instructions.”
“There is, in Mr. Crampton’s opinion, little doubt that the Administration at Washington is bent upon mischief,” Bunch told Mure. So the plan was to create as much pressure on the government in Washington as possible by appealing to the cotton interests. “You and I have been selected,” Bunch wrote, “to create such an alarm amongst our most influential dealers in cotton as, without passing the bounds of prudence or of truth, and without exposing ourselves to a charge of indiscretion, may serve to show the stirrers up of strife that a power can be found, within their own territory, stronger than they, against which it is useless to strive.”
Mure demurred. He had no time, no budget, no taste for it: if his role were found out, the effect would be disastrous. And he knew that whether this information was from Crampton or not, Crampton had already gotten himself into enough trouble.