Christopher Dickey

“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

“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