Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South,

[Ichingcarpenter]

Confederate Madness Then and Now
A British consul witnessed the cynical process that plunged the United States into civil war in the 1860s. His observations can teach us a lot today.







Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South, to be published next week


From 1853 to 1863, this young and cynical—but quite sane—British consul served in South Carolina as the representative of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. While he worked to ingratiate himself with the local slave-holding gentry, his secret dispatches to the Foreign Office in London and to his superiors at the British legation in Washington conveyed his horror at what he saw around him.

Like one of those conflicted, ambiguous figures in a John Le Carré novel, Bunch was not outwardly heroic, his motives could be ambiguous, and he operated in what the historian Amanda Foreman has called “the grey area where diplomacy ends and spy craft begins.” But all of that makes his non-ideological reporting all the more useful as we try to make sense of what happened more than 150 years ago, and indeed what has happened over the last month since Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel AME Church.

* * *

In January 1854, just a few weeks after Robert Bunch and his new wife arrived in Charleston, he wrote a private letter to a colleague at the Foreign Office that summed up not only the monstrous way blacks were treated but the unrepressed decadence of the white elite around him: "The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described,” wrote Bunch. “My next door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own people—men and women—when they misbehaved. I hear also that he makes them strip, and after telling them that they were to consider it as a great condescension on his part to touch them, gives them a certain number of lashes with a cow-hide. The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society—for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society. It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog."

So extreme was the pro-slavery avant-garde in Charleston in the 1850s that its leaders pushed to reopen the long-banned importation of captive Africans: a commerce—a holocaust, in fact—in which over the years millions of men, women, and children were packed into ships where, as one U.S. Navy officer put it, there was “scarcely space to die in.”

The role Britain played, or rather, refused to play in the American Civil War was absolutely critical to its outcome. Today people think they know that the British opposed all slavery, or they think they know that Britain supported the South during the war. But the truth lay between those contradictory views........................\


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/14/confederate-madness-then-and-now.html?via=desktop&source=facebook


Interesting read and I think the book with his letters from that time should be illuminating.

[PeoViejo]

1. A lot of the British support had to do with their industrial base.

British mills needed the Cotton and the South needed Arms, so it was quite convenient for both; and the Slaves were needed to process the Cotton.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. the role of the North in the cotton trade

'


But also it is interesting was the role of the North in the cotton trade which you can read here


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/trading-with-the-enemy/

[PeoViejo]

4. Interesting History

Reality is not so simple as the History Books might try to portray events.

Thank You.

[Ex Lurker]

2. Britain learned to grow cotton in Egypt and India

replacing the southern cotton. They still nearly intervened in the war on the Southern side when the US Navy boarded a British merchant ship to arrest two Confederate diplomats, going so far as to send troops to Canada.

[Octafish]

5. ''It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog."

In 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war unequivocally into a crusade against slavery, and the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg made it clear that secession was no fait accompli, all chances of British support for the Confederacy withered and died—but the fighting went on for almost two more horrible years. In the end, as Bunch had predicted, the prestige and power of the slaveholders was gone, and their world was laid waste.

Thank you for this lost, heartbreaking and compelling history, Ichingcarpenter! Helps explain how the Aristocracy survived on this side of the pond. The way old slaves were treated helps explain the attitude toward older workers, the homeless, the unemployed, the sick, the poor, social security...