Military history

Chapter 14

ON OCTOBER 16, 1859, the abolitionist zealot John Brown attacked the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, aiming to launch, at last, the long-feared “servile insurrection” that would sweep through the South. Brown’s plan, as such, was an utter failure. But he ignited the smoldering anger on both sides of the slavery issue like a bellows pumping flames out of white-hot coals.

Lyons at first hugely underestimated the impact the Brown raid was likely to have. “The Harper’s Ferry Affair has turned out absurd enough,” he wrote to the Richmond consul a few days after the incident, and he advised London that the American public was “absorbed by a foolish affair.” But Bunch saw the furor around John Brown as the cataclysm it was. News of the “extraordinary servile insurrection,” often wildly exaggerated, had caused “unprecedented excitement in all the Southern country,” as South Carolina papers reported. “I anticipate a disagreeable winter at my post,” Bunch wrote to Lyons while en route to Washington. “There is much trouble brewing for us all.”

Lyons, by then, had begun to realize that, new as he was to Washington, to the United States, and to the ways of the South, he needed Bunch’s intimate expertise. And Bunch knew that Lyons knew. He sent him a steady stream of private letters and clippings as well as dispatches to be duly forwarded to London.

In the aftermath of Harpers Ferry, there was an immediate problem for the Crown’s interests. A great many Britons had been involved with John Brown. So had several of the politicians from the North who had been very good friends to the British legation. Indeed, if anyone cared to look, the John Brown plot could be portrayed as a conspiracy by John Bull.

Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a former U.S. secretary of war and now one of the most powerful senators on the Hill, was among those who saw multiple signs of British complicity. “I believe a conspiracy has been formed,” said Davis, and if English abolitionists weren’t behind it, there was no question that some were part of it. It seemed the British had even sent an expert in guerrilla warfare to train John Brown’s men in Kansas.

What Davis did not know was that Her Majesty’s consul in Charleston was one of that guerrilla fighter’s most sincere admirers.

HUGH FORBES WAS the kind of character who erupts in America’s headlines, then disappears from its histories as if he never had a life outside his brief moment of fame in the press. But Forbes, even as soldiers of fortune go, was pretty extraordinary. In the words of British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, “He was what is called ‘an original.’ ”

Forbes came from a prosperous family and entered Oxford when he was fifteen. He received a commission in Britain’s famous Coldstream Guards and after about twenty years of service tried to settle down with his second wife, a beautiful Italian, to a comfortable life in Tuscany. But Forbes at forty was restless, and so, everywhere he looked, was Italy. In early 1848 Forbes joined the revolution and went to fight by the side of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

At first the Italian wasn’t sure what to make of this “eccentric Briton.” Forbes was lean and grizzled and instead of a uniform wore a light summer suit and a white stovepipe hat more appropriate for a gentleman strolling in Hyde Park than for a soldier on the battlefield. But while many of Garibaldi’s red-shirted partisans melted away into the countryside on the long, harrowing march from Rome through the mountains to the Adriatic coast in 1849, Forbes marched and fought. The Italian commander, watching the column snaking through the hills, could always see in the distance that pale suit, that stovepipe hat. Later, Garibaldi remembered Forbes as a “most courageous and honorable soldier.”

When the Austrians captured Forbes, the British government took a keen interest in his release. This may have been because of his connections in London; the fraternity of the Coldstream Guards was no negligible thing. But the most important reason why Her Majesty’s government pushed hard to liberate Hugh Forbes in 1849 was that then–Foreign Secretary Palmerston could not bear to see any Briton in the hands of those Europeans he considered lesser beings. “The Austrians are really the greatest brutes that ever called themselves by the undeserved names of civilized men,” Palmerston wrote to his envoy in Vienna.

When Forbes got out, he made his way to New York City, and for a few months Garibaldi joined him there. The father of Italian unification worked in a candle factory on Staten Island, then went back to sea as a merchant captain. Forbes stayed behind. He found such employment as he could: he taught fencing; he worked as a journalist and translator for Horace Greeley’s Tribune; and he ran a little paper of his own, The European, promoting the ideals of revolution and liberty among the immigrants of New York. He seems to have been constantly short of money and often in despair.

In those years, from 1848 to 1852, Bunch was serving as the British vice consul and acting consul in New York City, and he certainly would have heard of Forbes. He may even have known him. When he wrote about Forbes in his private letters to Lyons and in formal dispatches to the Foreign Office, he endorsed many of the freedom fighter’s views so enthusiastically that it’s hard to imagine the two had never crossed paths in the days before Forbes got involved with John Brown.

In 1855 Hugh Forbes published his Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer on Active Service in Regular and Irregular War, a practical guide to insurgency whose basic principles were as solid as anything penned a century later by Che Guevara. But it made Forbes no money, which is what he needed. By 1857, down and out and often drunk, Forbes was living in a slum apartment next to a whorehouse on Delancey Street.

Another English journalist working for Horace Greeley, James Redpath, arranged for Forbes to meet Brown, whose fame as a righteous, sword-wielding zealot in Kansas had begun to grow after he and his sons carried out a massacre at the town of Osawatomie. Brown might have had what one newspaper called “the craftiness of partial insanity,” but with help from his British friend Redpath he was winning the respect of—and collecting money from—some of the most important anti-slavery figures in the United States. They extolled his commitment to freedom; they claimed to admire his sacrifice. Sometimes they shipped him guns. What he needed most, however, was someone who could show him how to use those weapons more effectively, someone like Hugh Forbes.

The British veteran of the Italian wars had mixed feelings. Forbes despised slavery—no question about that. But this “Captain Brown,” as he styled himself, was no Garibaldi. His Kansas exploit was about chaotic ambushes, mobs, and murder in the night. Brown’s strategic thinking seemed delusional. It depended on what God told him and little else. “Enthusiasm is a very fine thing in its peculiar way,” Forbes wrote in his guerrilla manual, “but it cannot be constantly depended upon.”

Then again, the cause was good, the money was good, and Forbes imagined he would be a general in a great war against human bondage. When Forbes showed up in Iowa at Brown’s base camp to start his job, however, he discovered to his dismay that almost nobody was there. Most of the guns donated by support committees proved to be useless. The violence in Kansas had begun to subside, making Brown’s claims to be raising a militia for self-defense less credible to his backers. And the notions Brown started putting forth about starting a slave rebellion in the South sounded, to Forbes, completely and fatally flawed.

Brown’s plan, if it could be called that, lacked sufficient fighting men, it lacked direct communications with the slaves in Virginia, and by attacking a U.S. arsenal, it would provoke a direct test of arms with the Federal military, which would be unwinnable. So Forbes came up with a plan of his own: small bands of guerrillas operating along the border with the slave states would raid into them, helping the slaves escape in large numbers and undermining the value of slaves generally, because they quickly would be seen as unreliable and potentially dangerous property. John Brown would have none of that strategy. God knew better.

Forbes started trying to warn Brown’s backers about what the zealot with the icy blue eyes was planning in Virginia. He hoped that either they would cancel the project altogether or they would put him in charge of a more sensible guerrilla strategy. But several knew already of the dangerous plan for an uprising and immediately saw Forbes as a threat. When he demanded the money owed him, they deemed him an extortionist. Those who didn’t know about the Virginia plot thought Forbes, not Brown, was the one who was crazy. And one Northerner in particular had a significant investment in making sure Forbes appeared crazy.

IN THE SPRING of 1858, Senator William Seward of New York had just about quit denying that he wanted to be president. Nobody had believed him, anyway. He was the voice of the free-labor North, the moral and political leader of the fast-growing Republican Party. Good money said that he stood to be the next commander in chief of the increasingly divided United States.

Then a sere man with a stovepipe hat came knocking at Seward’s door in Washington. “The person who called himself Forbes was a stranger to me,” Seward told investigators two years later. “He came to my house and asked to see me. I saw him alone.” That much probably was true, although much of Seward’s account was evasive. “All kinds of erratic and strange persons call on me with all manner of strange communications and applications,” Seward said. “He was one of them, and it passed out of my memory without leaving attached to it the least idea of any importance.” The story that Forbes told him, Seward said, was “very incoherent, very erratic,” and seemed to be the product of “an unsound or very disturbed mind.”

Normally William Seward was amusing, theatrical, interested in everything. He hunched forward when he talked as if his “keen eyes were seeking for an adversary.” But by his own account, that night he remained silent. Smoke curled up from his cigar, and he let Forbes ramble on about being “a revolutionist in Italy in the year 1848, or about that period,” as Seward recalled. “He was a foreigner, either an Englishman or a Scotchman, I do not know which.” Seward remembered that Forbes showed him “a strange and absurd book, as I thought, giving the art of exciting or getting up military revolutions.” And then Forbes talked about John Brown, and what a bad man he was, and he talked about Kansas, which is when Seward cut him off. “I never give advice about Kansas,” the senator told Forbes. And the conversation ended. Or so the senator said when he was questioned about it.

Seward insisted that Forbes told him nothing at all about John Brown’s plan to launch a slave uprising in the South, although why Forbes would have spared Seward this information when he was spreading it around to so many others is not clear. Forbes wrote afterward of the meeting, “I went fully into the whole matter in all its bearings.” Probably Forbes did tell Seward about the plot for an uprising, but that did not mean Seward endorsed it. He was far too cautious for that. The consequences could have been fatal, politically and literally, given the vindictive spirit of the times.

Faced with the threat of Forbes’s revelations, several conspirators behind Brown pushed back their planned launch of the slave uprising to the winter and then well into the following year. They hoped that Hugh Forbes would look more like a lunatic than ever when his predictions failed to materialize. And once the raid on Harpers Ferry took place, the rest would be history.

“NOTHING COULD BETTER prove Old Brown’s unfitness for the part he undertook to play than the reckless manner in which he compromised all his friends by preserving their correspondence instead of destroying it,” the New York Heraldinformed its readers at the end of October 1859, when John Brown’s trial began. “He had a carpet bag stuffed full of letters from leading men in the North and West; and, in addition to that, his house was strewn with documents.”

Hugh Forbes loomed large in that scattered archive. His texts soon filled the columns of newspapers all over the United States and Europe. And in Forbes—or at least in the Forbes documents—Robert Bunch found an ally.

“Amongst the papers seized by the authorities of Virginia after the late outbreak at Harper’s Ferry, there is said to have been found a ‘Report,’ addressed by one Hugh Forbes, an Englishman, to the Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London upon the subject of slavery in the U.S.,” Bunch scrawled in a letter marked private that he sent directly to Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, after duly asking Lyons’s permission. Indeed, Bunch was sending not one but two copies of the clipping to London, almost as if he were the proud author. “I consider it both an interesting and correct statement of the rise and progress of the pro-slavery feeling in the South of this Republic, of its present dangerous condition, and of its probable future,” Bunch wrote. “It is possible that I may view Mr. Forbes’s opinions with too partial an eye, as they are, in almost every respect, the same which I have submitted to Her Majesty’s Government at various periods during my residence in South Carolina, but notwithstanding this risk, I have thought it advisable to communicate the papers to Your Lordship.”

The Forbes letter to the Anti-Slavery Society in London, written in February 1858 at about the same time Forbes was knocking on the doors of Brown’s backers in New England and Washington, is not in the least deranged or erratic. It is straightforward, passionate, and unreserved in a way that Robert Bunch obviously appreciated.

For starters, Forbes set out to demolish the notion that slave owners and slave advocates were open to sweet reason on humanitarian or economic grounds. “Slavery in the United States is a political question,” he wrote. “All other matters sink into insignificance beside it. It may actually be termed the only permanent question, since it absorbs all others. Not merely does it regard America, but it affects the well-being of all mankind; and if its partisans be not checked in their course, they will scatter desolation and blood over this continent to acquire land of which to make slave territory, and will plunge the world into war to sustain the piratical Slave Trade.”

The author of the Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer explained in his letter to London that the American government was controlled by the Senate and the Senate controlled by Democrats whose only criterion for office was “How is he on slavery?” The abolitionists were weak and the anti-slavery forces in the Senate divided and unreliable, he said. “As to Seward, of New York (the pet of the Trib une), he is a thorough party wire-puller and manager; and, notwithstanding his suavity of manner and speech, is the least reliable of them all.”

“Where will all this lead to?” Forbes asked. “If not impeded by practical measures, the pro-slavery political managers, North and South, will continue their encroachments on liberty.” Driven by the Democratic Party, the United States “will grasp islands in the West Indies, and slices of Mexico and Central America wherein to plant and to perpetuate slavery—it will reopen the slave trade (the poor whites are already swallowing the bait in the shape of a promise of a slave each)—it will re-enslave the free men of color (the project is already canvassed)—it will make the United States become the great slavery propagandist power of the world, and consequently the mortal enemy of every oppressed people which may struggle to throw off the yoke of despotism.” It will be especially “antagonistic to England, which is the great anti-slavery power,” wrote Forbes. “Neither the intrigues of corrupt, unreliable stump orators and political wire-pullers, nor the tricks of cheating speculators, nor the sighing and preaching of amiable philanthropists, deficient in energy and resolution, will arrest the onward march of slavery.”

If Bunch had ever met Forbes when he was consul in New York or during those long sojourns up North escaping the summer pestilence in Charleston, he did not say so in his surviving correspondence. Perhaps he just liked what he read. It was such a clear synopsis of his own views, there was almost no point with which he disagreed, and by sending the clippings to Lyons even before his visit to Washington, Bunch was giving the new minister in the capital of the United States a crash course in the hard political truths of slavery in America.

But for Bunch to embrace Forbes’s radical views virtually as his own in official correspondence, sending them with enthusiastic endorsement directly to Lord Russell in London, suggests something more than mere admiration. Why would Bunch, so cautious in so many ways, want to identify himself wholeheartedly with a man seen by much of the world as an eccentric, drunken reprobate? Perhaps he did know Forbes and knew his worth, and, if that was the case, perhaps he thought it wiser not to put that fact in writing. He’d gone quite far enough. In Charleston it would cost him his life if he were linked to a fellow Briton who advocated guerrilla war to free the slaves.

CONVERSATION DURING BUNCH’S overnight at the British legation on Sunday, November 6, must have covered quite a bit of ground. Certainly it changed radically the tone in the relationship with Lord Lyons. The new minister wrote to Bunch a few days later to tell him he hoped “whenever you come North again, you will not forget that I shall always have real pleasure in seeing you here.”

What had they talked about? Inevitably there would have been stories shared, cautiously at first, about colleagues in the Foreign Office Maybe they reminisced about Old Bulwer, who was in ill health in Constantinople, and Crampton, who’d been made ambassador to Moscow, where the old bachelor’s name was being connected to that of a beautiful opera singer. The two might compare impressions, discreetly, of the elegant Clarendon and stiff little Lord John Russell. Perhaps they groaned a bit if one or the other of them mentioned Hammond. Certainly Lyons and Bunch talked about the John Brown affair. The old man had been tried already and convicted, his bravery inspiring his partisans and discomfiting his enemies. “If it is deemed necessary that I shall forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice,” Brown told the judge who sentenced him to hang, “and mingle my blood farther with the blood of my children and the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.”

Lyons and Bunch, pondering such a figure, would have had a chance to test each other’s real views on slavery. When Lyons’s father had been the minister in Athens years before, he’d maneuvered to stop Greek ships trafficking slaves off the Barbary Coast, and Lord Lyons could find no excuse for the institution wherever it existed, but he had little direct contact with slavery as it was practiced in America. Bunch, for his part, had no end of rough stories to tell about the Southerners, their servants, their victims, abuses, arrogance, duplicity, and the dangers they could pose to British interests. Maybe Lyons had expected, after exchanges with Napier, that he would have to deal with another apologist for Manifest Destiny. Maybe he had heard about the Savannah consul, Molyneux, and wondered if this Charleston consul, too, was a slave owner. But, no, here was this younger colleague who could easily, concisely, amusingly present the whole dreadful political show in America, making observations on the price of Negroes and explaining the way the political parties were fracturing and reforming and how all this was driving the South not only toward secession but toward a reopening of the slave trade across the Middle Passage, which was something that the Crown—indeed, that the Queen and her Consort—could never abide.

By the time Robert Bunch ended his visit with Lord Lyons at the legation in Washington on Monday, November 7, it appears that he and the new minister had reached a meeting of the minds and forged the beginning of an alliance that would play a vital role in London’s decision making during the next three critical years.

Their dispatches would go to Lord John Russell, but their main target would be Lord Palmerston. They knew they did not need to convince either man about the evils of the slave trade as an abstraction or as a historical problem. What they had to do, and would do again and again, and in many different ways, was to remind Russell and Palmerston that the slave trade holocaust was here and now in the Congo and Cuba, and coming soon to what would be called the Confederate States of America.

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