Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South by Christopher Dickey Hugh Dubrulle Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South. By Christopher Dickey. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2015. Pp. [xii], 388. $27.00, ISBN 978-0-307-88727-6.) Christopher Dickey has written a fascinating account of Robert Bunch’s tenure as British consul in Charleston, South Carolina. Between 1853 and 1863, in addition to discharging the normal duties of a consul, Bunch undertook several subtle diplomatic campaigns. He first sought to repeal the Negro Seamen Act (which affected British sailors of color and offended Foreign Office sensibilities) before quietly working to expose the illicit slave trade that still brought boatloads of suffering Africans to southern shores. Once secession broke out, Bunch did his best to keep his superiors—Lord Lyons, the British minister in Washington, D.C., and Lord John Russell, the foreign secretary in London—apprised of events in the spiritual home of southern separatism. Bunch sought to undermine international sympathy for the new Confederacy by ensuring that South Carolina’s attitudes toward the reopening of the transatlantic slave trade were conveyed to the outside world. All the while, he played a dangerous double game by masking his true feelings and objectives from the South Carolina elites among whom he worked. In 1861, Bunch’s greatest triumph—helping secure Confederate adherence to the Declaration of Paris—was followed almost immediately by his downfall, which was precipitated by an incident involving one of the couriers he had used to carry his diplomatic pouches. The federal government revoked Bunch’s exequatur, and although he remained in Charleston until early 1863, the usefulness of this ambitious consul was at an end. Not surprisingly for someone with such an extensive journalistic background, Dickey is a practiced and highly effective storyteller. The work has a “you were there” quality as it takes the reader from the fetid and miserable holds of slave ships to the aristocratic elegance of the South Carolina Jockey Club’s Washington Race Course during Race Week. What’s more, the book is well researched as Dickey has made great efforts to delineate the relationships that Bunch formed with a variety of Britons and Americans. Focusing on Bunch is often a virtue because it allows Dickey to reveal the ambivalence and complexity of Britain’s relationship to the American South—something that southerners did not fully seem to understand until secession was doomed. In particular, Dickey captures the degree to which Britons found the South alien despite the close commercial ties between the two. At the same time, though, the adoption of a Bunch-eyed view of the South tends to magnify the consul’s importance as well as the significance of his particular concerns. While Bunch was more than a consul, he was less than a minister, and he was just one among many players in transatlantic diplomacy. Bunch’s superiors drew information from a wide variety of sources, and while they shared Bunch’s concern with the resurrection of the slave trade, this issue did not determine their attitude toward recognition of the Confederacy—something the [End Page 939] book comes close to suggesting. Moreover, writing from Bunch’s perspective leads to the confusion of South Carolina’s attitudes (“too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum,” according to James L. Petigru) with those of the South as a whole (p. 38). Finally, the concentration on Bunch leads to one curious omission: Bunch’s vice consul, Henry Pinckney Walker, who is referred to only in passing. Walker was a Briton and long a resident in Charleston who apparently shared some of his white southern neighbors’ attitudes. To what extent was this figure, who worked closely with Bunch and became consul after Bunch’s departure, complicit in his superior’s work of deception? These quibbles aside, Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South is an intriguing, enjoyable, and well-crafted contribution to the history of Civil War transatlantic relations. Hugh Dubrulle Saint Anselm College Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association