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Confederate Madness Then and Now
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/14/confederate-madness-then-and-now.htmlReally interesting piece on the British Consul in South Carolina before and during the Civil War, as well as some history of the banner that entered popular consciousness as "the Confederate Flag".
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.
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."
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.
...
In an extraordinarily prescient letter in January 1859, Bunch wrote of the Carolinians, “They are rather amused at the idea of embarrassing the Federal Government, and perhaps, in a lesser degree, of annoying Great Britain, but they will awake from their delusion to find the Democratic Party broken up and the whole power of the Country thrown into the hands of the ‘Republicans.’…When this shall happen, the days of Slavery are numbered…The prestige and power of Slave holders will be gone, never to return.”
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."
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.
...
In an extraordinarily prescient letter in January 1859, Bunch wrote of the Carolinians, “They are rather amused at the idea of embarrassing the Federal Government, and perhaps, in a lesser degree, of annoying Great Britain, but they will awake from their delusion to find the Democratic Party broken up and the whole power of the Country thrown into the hands of the ‘Republicans.’…When this shall happen, the days of Slavery are numbered…The prestige and power of Slave holders will be gone, never to return.”
The astuteness of that observation goes without saying.
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