WHEN BUNCH GOT BACK to Charleston on November 10, 1859, he started tracking the post–Harpers Ferry panic in the South like a sailor watching the mercury plunge in a barometer. There was “a feeling of uneasiness, and even of terror in this community and state,” said Bunch. And for a consul leading a double life among the slave owners he denounced so often and so unequivocally in his secret correspondence, that unease must have been profound. One intercepted dispatch could cost him his position and even his life.
“I do not exaggerate in designating the present state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign of terror,” Bunch wrote to Lord John Russell in early December. “Persons are torn away from their residences and pursuits, sometimes ‘tarred and feathered,’ ‘ridden upon rails,’ or cruelly whipped; letters are opened at the post offices; discussion upon slavery is entirely prohibited under penalty of expulsion, with or without violence, from the country. The northern merchants and ‘travelers’ are leaving in great numbers.” In another dispatch, Bunch wrote that “on the part of individuals the sense of danger is evinced by the purchase of fire-arms, especially of revolver pistols, of which very large numbers have been sold during the last month.”
Bunch was sending a constant stream of letters marked private and confidential to his new ally in Washington, Lord Lyons, and Lyons, summarizing and reinforcing, was using those in his own correspondence with Lord John Russell.
On December 6 Lyons warned the Foreign Secretary that the U.S. government was not going to address the slave-trade issue any more than it had done already by stepping up some of its naval patrols. Buchanan already had gone out ahead of public opinion, said Lyons, although in the South legalizing the slave trade “has many avowed advocates.” Indeed, “the state of feeling at this moment in the South upon the whole question of Slavery is shocking,” Lyons warned. “The Harper’s Ferry Affair seems to have excited Southern passions to an indescribable degree.” The dissolution of the Union is just one measure that was being talked about, said Lyons: “There are plans for the re-enslavement of all the emancipated Negroes, for the purging of the South of all Whites suspected of abolition tendencies.”
Because the mails had become so insecure, Lyons gave Bunch a version of diplomatic code to use for sensitive correspondence, and on Christmas Eve the consul could not join Emma and Helen for the celebrations until he had finished laboring over a little pad full of crisscrossed alphabets. “There seems a prospect—I think a remote one—of trouble in the neighborhood,” Bunch wrote in his usual, functional longhand. But that was not really what he wanted to say. The characters changed to seemingly random sequences of Greek letters and symbols in groups of four:
uβm8 οιdκ fxdπ uΔeα
oδχα ϕxzg τηΥg qκΨΘ…
The cipher continued for a page and a half. What it said, decoded, was: “Six companies of infantry are ready to march at a moment’s notice to Kingstree…to repress Negroes. Revenue cutter is searching all country boats, and the [powder] magazine here is guarded.”
Charleston had revived a volunteer force called the “Fire Guard”: two companies of infantry and a squadron of cavalry that turned out whenever there was a fire in the night in case it might be the result of a riot or an uprising. Bunch sent clippings back to London about the creation in Charleston of a “Committee of Safety” with branches in several wards of the city “to aid in the detection, arrest, and proper treatment of Abolition sympathizers and emissaries whose presence may be prejudicial to the public peace.” Bunch wrote beneath the clipping: “Comité de Salut Publique,” alluding to the murderous political gangs of the French Revolution.
Even Bunch’s long, painstaking work on the narrow issue of the Negro Seamen Act was now in danger. “Two idiots in the S.C. Legislature brought in bills to restore the old law of 1835,” he wrote to Lord Lyons. “They were submitted to the ‘Committee upon Colored Populations’ of which my friend Mr. Read is the chairman,” and “he writes that he fears the worst, as he gets no support even from the Charleston Delegation.”
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FROM WASHINGTON, LYONS also warned Lord Russell that the old, draconian law might be reinstated, but he believed that Her Majesty’s man in Charleston could handle the situation: “I trust Mr. Bunch, the Consul in South Carolina, may succeed in preventing the infamous colored-seamen law from passing. He has had great experience of such matters and has shown on previous occasions great tact and judgment in the management of them.”
Bunch wrote that his friend Read in the state legislature had suggested to “my excellent old ally” Alfred Huger that expressions of support from Charleston merchants might help prevent the return to the old ways of dealing with black sailors. So Bunch prepared memos to the South Carolina House and Senate signed by the president of the Chamber of Commerce and leading businessmen saying they liked the law just the way it was and didn’t want it changed. “Of course, I do not appear,” Bunch explained to Lyons. “Mr. Huger (the Post Master) manages it all.”
Bunch was shrewd, but that did not mean he wasn’t very worried. “Under ordinary circumstances, I should have no fears,” Bunch told Lyons, “but when people go stark, staring mad, and one cannot get at them to put on straight-waistcoats [straitjackets], one should be prepared for a good deal of damage.”
Lord Russell, legalistic as ever, was sure the South Carolina law would be unconstitutional and suggested that a test case could be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, apparently ignoring the disastrous results of George Mathew’s attempt to do that many years before. Lord Lyons, drawing on Bunch’s advice, tried to kill that idea. As Bunch had pointed out, the Supreme Court as then constituted was completely pro-slavery. The explosive Dred Scott decision in 1857, which required free-soil states to return escaped slaves to their owners and declared that no blacks could be citizens or enjoy any citizen’s rights, provided ample proof of the Court’s views. It was “a direct misinterpretation of the law” and a flagrant “prostitution of judicial integrity,” said Bunch. The bottom line: the Crown would have to rely on Bunch’s diplomacy. And, indeed, when the South Carolina legislature finally adjourned, Bunch had won once again. The law—the one that Bunch had written, to all intents and purposes—would stay in force.
Lyons, studying up on his history, probably heard from Northerners in Washington such as Senator Seward that the South’s rage would blow out in 1860 just as it had during the nullification and secession crisis almost thirty years before. So Lyons asked Britain’s man in Charleston to compare anti-Union sentiment then and now.
This was the holiday season, and as Bunch wrote he was interrupted several times by fellow Britons showing up at his residence in “various stages of decadence” and by the venerable French consul, the Count de Choiseul. But Her Majesty’s man in Charleston gave long and careful consideration to the question posed by the new minister in Washington, and to his own feelings about those United States, where he had such deep roots and for which he felt such complex emotions:
“That the dislike to the Union now existing in the Southern Country is more intense than it has been at any former period is, I think, unquestionable,” Bunch wrote. Even during the secession movement of 1832, to which “the venerated Jackson, familiarly known as ‘Old Hickory,’ put so decided a stop,” the state of South Carolina and the South generally were pretty equally divided into Union and Disunion parties. “Now, scarcely a voice is raised in favor of the Union—everybody, including those who were the most energetic Union Men in 1832, is in favor of immediate separation if the South fails to secure from the present Congress some effective guarantee, not only against attacks à la John Brown…but against any interference at all with Slavery on the part of the Free States. I think, therefore, that I can safely assure Your Lordship that the feeling against the Union, just now, is stronger and more widely spread than it has ever been before.”
But Bunch allowed himself a bit of wishful thinking. He did not believe the Union would disintegrate immediately, he said, and clearly hoped that it would last a good long time. “A great Republic like this—the evolution of a great thought—of a great experiment, is not to be broken to pieces by one, or half a dozen blows,” he wrote. “It has immense vitality and will, in my humble judgment, stand a good deal more knocking about than it has yet had. Besides which, are the South prepared to organize a government which shall take its place? Why, I do not believe that any three Southern States could be found to agree upon any one simple point, except perhaps that every man has an inalienable right to ‘wallop his own nigger.’ ” That, said Bunch, would be a poor foundation for the building of a new empire.
“My own belief is that we shall see, before long, a reaction at the North,” said Bunch. “There is, as Your Lordship will have seen, a substratum of conservative common sense at the bottom of the American character which, although covered and concealed by the fantastic folly of the masses, still exists to be counted upon when the need arises. So soon as that is dug down to, in other words, so soon as people are really persuaded that the Union is in danger, we shall see a great change.”
Bunch was not being sentimental. He said he liked American-style democracy about as much as he liked sour wine, but, “I own to a sneaking kindness for our American off-shoot, and I should see with regret the application of the pruning-knife” that would shear away large parts of it. “Full of faults as the system is…it has much to do yet for the good of mankind. Once divided, the prestige is gone.” If one or two states could break away, and the principle of secession were accepted, “where will the practice stop?”