Our Man in Charleston : Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South (9780307887290) by Dickey Christopher

Author:Dickey, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

EARLY ON CHRISTMAS EVE AFTERNOON, Robert Bunch received an unexpected visitor. A Mr. Thomas Butler Gunn from the New-York Evening Post was arriving too late for the Secession Convention’s most dramatic act, but his editor, John Bigelow, had decided the story was too big to heed the warning of Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr. Gunn was taking his life in his hands, but he figured he’d have some added protection because he was, as many of his countrymen in America were inclined to say just then, “an Englishman thoroughly grateful for his British accent.” Before Gunn left New York, he even went to the British consul there, the efficient Edward Mortimer Archibald, to get what he called “a quasi-passport to the South,” and one of the first stops he made the day after he dropped his bags at the Charleston Hotel was down “on Meeting Street towards the Battery, the aristocratic end of it,” to have that document countersigned “gratis” by Her Majesty’s consul in South Carolina.

Bunch’s home office was “an exceedingly British-looking apartment,” Gunn wrote in his diary, “with portraits of the Queen, Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, sketches of noble heads, and a large engraving of the coronation.” About Bunch himself there was an air of inconspicuousness, even invisibility: he was “slim” and appeared “elderly,” although he was only forty at the time. Gunn could not have known, of course, how difficult the last seven years had been. He saw Bunch as a “neatly shaved man attired in gray, with a tendency to baldness.” When Gunn first entered, Bunch was “fussing about” trying to attach a little gilded version of the Prince of Wales crest, three feathers emerging from a coronet, above Bertie’s portrait. Bunch said he’d gotten it in New York and mentioned that he’d been on the Harriet Lane, then gave up his fussing, put the crest away, and sat down to talk.

The two men quickly discovered that they enjoyed each other’s company. Gunn found Bunch a “chatty, diplomatic, amusingly British person in manner, speech, and opinions.” Bunch confided to Gunn, as the heir to the throne had, perhaps, confided to him, that Bertie might further his worldly education with a visit to the South and to the West Indies. (Bunch probably did not say how much that prospect horrified him.) The consul told tales of serving at several South American posts and regaled his new acquaintance with stories about his seven long years in South Carolina that left the reporter “half-laughing” for most of the time they were together.

For his part, Gunn had set out for Charleston on the side-wheeler Marion. His fellow passengers had included Southern medical students headed home to join regiments, an eccentric old sea captain who’d been to the Arctic and who now wrote pro-secession poetry, and an evil-looking dentist whose conversation Gunn summed up in a single sentence: “We have paid for our niggers, and we are going to keep ’em, by God!” It was a long trip.

“The first

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