Our Man in Charleston Quotes

“It did not take Bunch very long, amid the politicking and the revelry, to discover the darker side of life in Charleston’s homes. “The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described,” he wrote in a private letter that wound up prominently positioned in the official slave-trade correspondence of the Foreign Office. “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.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“Captain Timothy Meaher, the boat’s owner, was drinking with the rest of them, and he focused his cunning gray eyes on Russell. Meaher figured the foreign journalist might not understand the way folks did things here in America, so close to the old frontier. White men had claimed”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“He famously said of secession, a notion raised often over cigars and brandy, that “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“The slaves were arranged in families according to their nearest relationship, and sold in lots at so much a head. The competition was tolerably brisk, and several lots—old men, babies, and all—sold very well. The scene, of course, was most painful, humiliating and degrading. I became quite affected myself, and was obliged to hurry away, for fear of showing what I felt.” These were, precisely, the sights of Charleston that welcomed Bunch and began to change him. The ambitious young consul who had referred so casually to the “nigger question” now found that wherever he walked, and, indeed, wherever he looked, the weight of slavery bore down on him. Bunch had seen plenty of inhumanity and suffering in his life, from the plantations of Peru to the gang-ridden slums of Five Points in New York City. He had seen servants abused countless times in countless ways. But he had never seen or heard anything quite like what he saw and heard in this city to which he had brought his wife and where he hoped to have his children. In this new position with new responsibilities, and in this place, the young consul quickly grew bitter, even desperate. His initial comments on “the civility of these good people” soon gave way to a much darker view.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“A young British lieutenant remembered the scene emotionally. “The gang was to be sold in families,” he wrote. “The Negroes, with their wives and little ones, were standing huddled together in a crowd behind the platform on which each family was exposed for sale in turn, according to a printed program.” Many of the slaves “seemed indifferent, and a stout Negress or two looked, occasionally, even defiant; but there were several mothers with their babies at their breasts (and even black innocence and helplessness are pretty and interesting) sobbing bitterly.” He continued: “The auctioneer explained the conditions of sale to the company, and stated that all the niggers were to be considered sound, unless anything was said to the contrary.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“In the 1840s, after Charles Dickens toured the United States, he linked the American inclination to bloodshed with the barbarity of slavery. It was no surprise, he said, that in a country where humans were branded, whipped, and maimed, where men “learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face,” they grew to be bullies and, “carrying cowards’ weapons hidden in their breast, will shoot men down and stab them” when they quarrel. Every day as Bunch walked the streets in South Carolina, he had cause to remember those lines.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“In financial terms, slaves in the South had become the stuff that dreams were made of. More than land, cotton, rice, or sugar, owning slaves came to be considered the standard measure of prosperity, the safest investment, and the most profitable commodity for speculation. “This alliance between Negroes and cotton, we will venture to say, is now the strongest power in the world,” wrote James De Bow, editor of the widely read De Bow’s Review in New Orleans, “and the peace and welfare of Christendom absolutely depend upon the strength and security of it.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“THE BUSINESS OF SELLING SLAVES had been changing in Charleston. It was no longer as picturesque as it had been when William Makepeace Thackeray first visited. In 1856, the city decided the auctions near the Old Exchange and Custom House were out of hand, and the various slave brokers started opening up their own showrooms, with pens outside to hold the chattel.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“Two people died for every one who made it to the auction block, he said.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“A pro-slavery crusade that could no longer be ignored was taking shape in the South, its centerpiece the fight to reopen the trade with Africa.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“In the 1840s, after Charles Dickens toured the United States, he linked the American inclination to bloodshed with the barbarity of slavery.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“Other nations, especially those enlightened and more old-fashioned in their notions, rebel, fight, and die for Liberty,” wrote Bunch, while South Carolina “is prepared to do the same for slavery.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“Where will all this lead to?” Forbes asked. “If not impeded by practical measures, the pro-slavery political managers, North and South, will continue their encroachments on liberty.” Driven by the Democratic Party, the United States “will grasp islands in the West Indies, and slices of Mexico and Central America wherein to plant and to perpetuate slavery—it will reopen the slave trade (the poor whites are already swallowing the bait in the shape of a promise of a slave each)—it will re-enslave the free men of color (the project is already canvassed)—it will make the United States become the great slavery propagandist power of the world, and consequently the mortal enemy of every oppressed people which may struggle to throw off the yoke of despotism.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South

“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.”
― Christopher Dickey, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South