Our Man in Charleston by Christopher Dickey - Broadway Books (2015)
Have you ever found yourself surrounded by strangers whose opinions differ strongly from your own? Have you ever walked through a city knowing that if the people shuffling past could peer inside your mind, you might be arrested and hanged for treason? Have you ever been forced to reconcile your warm feelings towards a friend with an irrepressible hatred of his values? Such is the life of a diplomat. As representatives of a foreign governmental body, these individuals often find themselves immersed in a culture they neither recognize nor accept. In order to serve as an effective intermediary, they must socialize with those they find morally repellant. They must at least profess to share interests with leading politicians and intellectuals—even if such interests are carefully restricted to the economic sphere. If a diplomat chooses to vocalize his own beliefs, he can burn the bridge of communication between his host and his nation—and risk being abandoned by both. A diplomatic career is rarely relaxing.
But those who find a way to survive amongst their enemies, who know how to alleviate paranoia from all sides and maintain treacherous avenues of communication, are some of the most gifted, insightful individuals passing through the world. They learn how to read subtle changes in expression, how to suggest outcomes without making promises, and how to appear open-minded and willing to negotiate even when their stomachs boil with anger and disgust. Robert Bunch, the British consul stationed in Charleston during the early years of the American Civil War, was adept at befriending and manipulating the powerful planation-owners of the South. During his time in South Carolina, he somehow managed to convince the Federal Government in Washington, the volatile Southern ‘Fire-eaters’ screaming for secession, and the distant British Crown, that he was definitely on their side. Christopher Dickey’s incredible biography Our Man in Charleston tells the story of how Robert Bunch survived the collapse of the Union without compromising his humanist beliefs.
Christopher Dickey has written several books on international politics and the evolving relationships between competing nations. His quick, factually-dense style of writing stems from his experience as a foreign correspondent and internationally-renowned journalist. Now serving as the world news editor for The Daily Beast, Dickey has also worked as the Central American foreign corespondent for The Washington Post, and the Middle East foreign corespondent for Newsweek. He has reported from multiple war zones, including those in Central America, the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. Dickey’s articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Foreign Policy Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair. He frequently appears as an expert commentator on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera.
Having lived in hostile territories, having earned the trust of wary individuals, Dickey understands the challenges a diplomat might encounter in a foreign nation on the brink of war. His empathy for the British consul in Charleston encourages the reader to hope for Bunch’s eventual salvation. As the dreams of a Confederate State began to gain traction in the South, Bunch found himself surrounded by fanatics and white supremacists. Dickey skillfully builds suspense by emphasizing the mounting urgency of Bunch’s situation. As the book progresses, Bunch overcomes threats to his personal safety, accusations from the North and South, ridicule from the British Foreign Office in London, and the likely possibility of his being stranded in a new Southern nation, cut-off from the Crown and the more moderate thinkers in America. The image that comes to mind when I think of the narrative progression of Dickey’s book is the scene in Star Wars Episode IV—A New Hope in which Luke, Leia and Han Solo are trapped in a trash compactor while the walls are closing in and a tentacled monster is slithering through the rubbish. Bunch hated South Carolina almost as soon as he arrived in the muggy metropolis, but it wasn’t until the walls started moving and he was forced to wade among the monsters that things really began to look dire.
Bunch was first sent to Charleston after his predecessor invoked the ire of the Southern planters. Consul Matthew was tasked with bringing about the abolition of the Negro Seaman Act. This law allowed Carolinian policemen to imprison free negro sailors because their presence was seen as a threat to the established social order. The ominous specter of a ‘servile insurrection’ was the white minority’s greatest fear. The British government, which abolished slavery in 1833, had been vocal in its opposition to the slave trade. From a purely economic standpoint, the British navy was greatly inconvenienced every time the freeing of a sailor delayed a transatlantic journey. Sometimes the sailors were ‘accidentally’ sold into slavery and never recovered. Bunch was sent to Charleston to clean up the mess caused by Matthew, whose blustery personality offended leading Carolinians, and whose audacity in sending a letter to Washington asking that the Supreme Court take legal action against South Carolina resulted in his social isolation. Writes Dickey,
Intentionally or not, Matthew’s tone-deaf handling of what was referred to in correspondence as “the coloured seamen issue” threw into relief the qualities that a man might need to survive as British consul in a place as prone to outrage as Charleston. Any official who hoped to achieve Her Majesty’s ends there must be capable of a more delicate touch, with more savoir faire, more social awareness. To live among the slave-owning planters and make inroads into their society, charming them while never forgetting the core interests of the Crown, required a man with a special background and demeanor…
Robert Bunch had such a demeanor. He knew how to sever his public life from his private one. He know how to communicate without giving too much away. He knew how to remain influential without being conspicuous. Writes Dickey,
As with many diplomats and spies—who are also functionaries and bureaucrats—Robert Bunch had to try to protect his back as he moved through the maze of duplicity he’d constructed around himself. He did not report everything he did…but he tried to report enough to cover himself if he was caught out. At the same time he constantly tried to read the winds of opinion among his superiors. If he had an inkling that, despite his best secret dispatches, London was inclined to go ahead with recognition of the Confederacy…then he needed to prepare the way for his future. Bunch had principles, but he had to remain in place if he was going to effect them.
During his time in Charleston, Bunch frequently had to clear the middle-ground between Britain’s moral responsibilities, and its economic interests. The British government promised to send a fleet of warships to guard the African coast, but American smugglers were constantly evading capture and refusing inspection under the protection of the American flag. In an effort to slow the alarming rate of American growth and to satisfy influential abolitionists within the British government, Great Britain emerged as the loudest anti-slavery voice in the industrial world. On the other hand, much of their own economic power depended upon cotton imported from the slave-owning Southern states. Writes Dickey,
[Charleston] was the epicenter of all the contradictions that London, whatever its passions, found difficult to face. England hated slavery but loved the cotton the slaves raised, and British industry depended on it. Defending Britain’s political interests while serving its commercial interests required constant delicate diplomacy, even in the most informal settings.
Bunch and his counterparts in Washington, Philadelphia, and London tried to think of a way for Britain to sustain its textile industry without overtly supporting the slave trade. Perhaps they could convince the Southern States to stop importing slaves from Africa, but allow them to cultivate their own. This idea attracted the wealthy planters of Virginia who had raised successive generations of American slaves and were afraid that a flooded slave market would reduce the value of their product. Unfortunately, the push to claim the newly opened Western frontier for the Southern states necessitated a huge population of slaves, and the Virginians simply could not satisfy demand. Another idea was for Britain to grow cotton in some of its other territories—like Egypt or Ceylon—over which it could exert greater control. The downside of this plan was that it would take years for the first crop to grow and for trade networks to be established, and the British economy—so reliant upon the cotton manufacturers in the North—might collapse in the meantime. If the British were no longer able to trade their textiles for silks and teas in the colonies, the whole international economy could break down one trade agreement at a time. The contradictions in British foreign policy were overshadowed only by the hypocrisies of the Southern elite. Every day, Bunch had to brave,
…a palpable undercurrent of fear and mistrust [that] filled what could seem at first a languorous city with a grating, omnipresent tension. From the first few weeks of what eventually became a decade spent in Charleston, Bunch was deeply disturbed by the mixtures of arrogance and fear, cruelty and luxury, piety and hypocrisy that were so deeply ingrained in Southern culture. He tried to look at it all with detached irony, but even in his private letters to his superiors…there were times when the irony, which he could not show publicly, became very bitter indeed on the pages of correspondence marked private and confidential.
Perhaps he should have been less detached. Perhaps he should have paraded a few of his private opinions before the public eye. Robert Bunch turned out to be such a wonderful spy, that he lost the trust of Washington. From the perspective of Abraham Lincoln and Assistant Secretary of State William Seward, Bunch had ‘gone native.’ He was now a Confederate sympathizer and an enemy of the Union. Bunch, whose geographical distance from London made communication with the Foreign Office slow and unreliable, had to battle suspicions from three sides. The Lincoln administration suspected him of advocating for the Secessionists with the British government. The British government accused him of recklessness when content from his private letters leaked into the American press. The fire-eaters suspected anyone who wasn’t a confirmed fire-eater of being a spy for Lincoln. Bunch found himself in an impossible situation, which Dickey describes as,
…full of ironies. Robert Bunch, who had worked so hard for so long for the “disentanglement” of Britain from the cotton-growing South, now suddenly became the symbol of secret and supposedly growing ties between the Confederacy and the Crown…The greatest irony was that he had done his job too well, earning the trust of people he despised in order to report honestly and accurately to Her Majesty’s government.
Contrary to most other historical figures, a good spy is measured by how much of his work is ultimately forgotten. Diplomats are unable to achieve much when they are the subject of public scrutiny and speculation. Perhaps the most accomplished representatives are the ones known only by the results they help to orchestrate. If a diplomat can make a carefully manipulated plan appear to unfold organically, he can consider his job well done. A good spy is not a man, but a shadow. This is why Christopher Dickey’s concluding remarks—which would seem depressing in any other biography—stand proud and erect as the greatest testament to Robert Bunch’s remarkable diplomatic success:
Bunch had helped to change the course of history; he had fought secretly but relentlessly against the cruel lunacy of slavery that surrounded him and that threatened to drag the wide world into America’s war; he had defended the humanity of black men and women who were treated no better than animals. And yet he, Robert Bunch, had been forgotten.
Evidently, as Our Man in Charleston shows, even those who are forgotten can bask in their allotted fifteen minutes of posthumous fame.
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