IN THE END, THERE WAS NO NEW Anglo-American war. Despite the diplomatic chill in the air, the squall never came ashore. Instead, President Pierce’s bellicosity was partly assuaged by attacking the British diplomats involved in the Crimean recruiting scandal. Late in the spring of 1856, months after the Treaty of Paris had ended the Crimean War, George Mathew and Anthony Barclay both had their consular accreditations—their “exequaturs,” in diplomatic language—taken away. Mathew went on to new assignments in Europe and then in Mexico. Barclay retired to Savannah with his very wealthy wife, a Georgia heiress who owned considerable properties and many slaves.
John Crampton was expelled from the Washington legation. He returned to England to receive a knighthood and a new European assignment from his appreciative government. The ostensible cause for his removal was his violation of the Neutrality Act because of his recruiting for the Crimea, but the New York Times made another, in some respects, more interesting connection. It reported that Crampton was “dismissed” by the Americans only three days after he had handed over to the State Department a damning report on the slaving activities of ships under the U.S. flag off the coast of Angola.
Inside the United States, passions in the debate over the expansion of slavery in the territories had grown so violent that nobody could predict what course they might take from day to day, whether at home or abroad. Charles Sumner, the tall, handsome, and refined Republican senator from Massachusetts, had many friends in London society and politics and had been a major source for much of Crampton’s intelligence about the inner workings of the U.S. Senate. He was a ferocious opponent of slavery, the slave trade, and the South, whose leading men he spoke about with savage contempt. On a stifling day in the spring of 1856 he addressed a packed Senate chamber about the critical question of whether “bleeding Kansas” should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free one. Then he focused his attention on the absent Senator Andrew Butler from South Carolina, personally insulting his reputation and that of the state in as many creative ways as he could imagine. Two days later, after the Senate had adjourned in the afternoon and Sumner was sitting at his desk signing envelopes so he could use his franking privilege to mail his speech all over the country, a congressman from South Carolina, a cousin of Butler’s named Preston Brooks, walked up to Sumner and laid into him with his gold-tipped cane. He beat the senator from Massachusetts senseless and shattered the cane.
In Charleston, according to Bunch, the incident got mixed reviews. “The mob, always the majority, like it, and the gentlemen do not.” But people were taking up collections to buy Brooks silver teapots as trophies—and new gold-headed canes, of course. “Vive la république!” Bunch concluded.
With Crampton gone and unrest so obvious, Clarendon authorized Bunch to report “from time to time on all matters of interest occurring in the United States.” This was an extraordinary vote of confidence in the would-be diplomat. Suddenly the Charleston consul was filing official reports to the Foreign Secretary almost as if he were the minister in Washington, D.C., and he wrote long dispatches about the upcoming American elections of 1856.
The Democratic Party, as Bunch wrote, had nominated the former U.S. minister to London, James Buchanan, who looked set to win against the new Republican Party, the Know-Nothings, and a few lesser contenders. Bunch reported on “the frightful state of civil war which has broken out in the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska,” and on what he interpreted as the surprising acceptance of its horrors by the man on the street. Abolitionists were burning down towns and capturing villages. So were the pro-slavery factions. The U.S. marshal and four of his men were killed arresting rioters. Several people, including two women, had been massacred when a hotel was burned in Lawrence, Kansas. “Were the matter of less fearful significance, it would be almost ludicrous to observe how little alarm or indignation these outrages appear to excite,” Bunch wrote. “The principal cause is doubtless the recklessness of the American character, and the aggressive propensities of the people. From every quarter persons are flocking toward the disturbed districts, all anxious to fight.”
The raw, barbaric emotions of the mob were easy for British gentlemen to sneer at (often they attributed them to the large number of Irish immigrants in the United States), but however that might be, violence was a given in American society. In the 1840s, after Charles Dickens toured the United States, he linked the American inclination to bloodshed with the barbarity of slavery. It was no surprise, he said, that in a country where humans were branded, whipped, and maimed, where men “learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face,” they grew to be bullies and, “carrying cowards’ weapons hidden in their breast, will shoot men down and stab them” when they quarrel. Every day as Bunch walked the streets in South Carolina, he had cause to remember those lines.