As tension over slavery and western expansion threatened to break the US into civil war, the Southern states found themselves squeezed between two nearly irreconcilable realities the survival of the Confederate economy would require the importation of more slaves a practice banned in America since 1807 but the existence of the Confederacy itself could not be secured without official recognition from Great Britain, who would never countenance reopening the Atlantic slave trade. How, then, could the first be achieved without dooming the possibility of the second? The unlikely man at the rolling center of the intrigue was Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman who had maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners.
