A Civil War (Secrets of the South Book 1)

Secrets of the South Mysteries Series

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To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Our Man in Charleston , please sign up. This book is well researched and very entertaining. It deals with the period just before the wars start. If you have any interest in the Civil War, this is a book you should read.

I don't know where to go to review this book, but it's great? Bob Just finished this book. I highly recommend to anyone interested in the Civil War Excellent account of the British government's active anti-slavery …more Just finished this book. I highly recommend to anyone interested in the Civil War Excellent account of the British government's active anti-slavery efforts around the world and their campaign to stop the African slave trade.

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It was very sad to see first hand accounts of many southern leaders who put economic gain above any consideration of the value of human life. See 2 questions about Our Man in Charleston…. Lists with This Book. Nov 07, Madelyn rated it it was ok Shelves: This will be a "mini review" - short and to the point. While I would love to expound, we'll save that for a later date, and books I'm more prone to recommended. I should have expected it, really. And maybe that book would be this one. In that This will be a "mini review" - short and to the point.

In that moment, I was an idealist. I'm not talking about "the n-word," surprisingly.

Montreal, City of Secrets - Baraka Books

Needless to say, I didn't get very far into the book before stopping. Sorry I couldn't bring a positive review! This Christmas, however, will be filled with book tours, author interviews, and countless exciting reading recommendations while you're off of work and school. I received a paper copy of this book from Blogging For Books.

All opinions expressed are entirely my own, and I was not under obligation to write a positive review. View all 5 comments. Aug 24, Vicki rated it it was amazing Shelves: This is the story of Robert Bunch, the British government's consul in Charleston before the start of the civil war. I have never read such chilling accounts of the slave industry as I did in this book. To know that even after it had been banned in the south a ship was confiscated and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was carrying what was left of four hundred plus Africans to America, it was treated as a nonoccurrence.

That the ship owners were let go by the leaders of the legal system i This is the story of Robert Bunch, the British government's consul in Charleston before the start of the civil war. That the ship owners were let go by the leaders of the legal system in Charleston shines a different light on what we in the south were told about slavery and Northern aggression. Bunch was in the thick of things in Charleston and he saw things that many were not able to see.

He sent dispatches back to England allowing them to have inside knowledge of the slave mentality of the south. Written in an easy to understand manner, I was pulled into the history of the prewar south. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. An excellent read that encapsulates the real reasons behind that war and why England was so staunchly anti confederacy. View all 3 comments. If he was to accomplish anything in his position he had to keep a smile on his face and convince everyone with any influence that he was, if not in agreement with their views, at least not opposed to them.

What he did do was perform his job diligently, keeping his government apprised of all that was happening in Charleston, the hotbed of the secessionist movement, and defending the rights of British subjects, including black ones, who had fallen afoul of South Carolina laws. One such law, the first Negro Seaman Act , ordered county sheriffs to arrest and detain all black seamen, regardless of nationality, until their ships were ready to leave harbor. How does one interact with a state that believes it is independent of the country that you have diplomatic relations with when that government denies that the schism has taken place yet at the same time is blockading the port of what it claims to be one of its own cities?

It also provided a semi-neutral ringside view of life in Charleston during the days leading up to the war. This Lincoln did and war was averted. When Albert reviewed the letter, he was suffering from the first symptoms of the cholera that would claim his life a few days later. I really enjoyed this book. It provided a lot of valuable background information that increased my understanding of the times and the people who lived them.

Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements: Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.

This is another book that I would like to rate 3. Much of it is excellent. It describes the horrors of life in antebellum Charleston, at least for the slave population, while contrasting the lives of the white population, who saw themselves as almost doing their slaves a 'favor'. This is a book about diplomacy and politics in a world on the brink of war and madness. It focuses on Robert Bunch, an ambitious but dedicated consul for the British government. It is Bunch's duty to report to th This is another book that I would like to rate 3. It is Bunch's duty to report to those at home about the situation in Charleston.

He is adamantly anti-slavery and the slave trade, but to get close to those in power he has to pretend to be sympathetic to their cause, a decepton, which is fraught with peril from the southerners, and ironically from the North as well after war is declared. The sheer arrogance of those in Charleston, who believed that Britain's need for cotton would trump their hatred of the slave trade, is told in the letters and dispatches sent by Bunch in the period of His mission concerning the Negro Seamen's Act and the slave trade, which takes up most of the book, soon makes it obvious that there was only one answer--war.

More than once Bunch asserts that the South is making a grave mistake in allowing their 'peculiar institution' to blind them to the destructive consequences of their actions. After the war starts, the Bunch story takes a backseat to the world stage, especially after Secretary of State Seward takes it into his head to deny Bunch many of the credentials he needs to do his job.

As a result, he finally gets away from Charleston in He had served Britain--and the Union well. This is different from the usual Civil War books that I read about battles and campaigns, but I learned a great deal about this tragic time. We should all be grateful that the institution of slavery was destroyed, however, many of its darker aspects still linger even after years.

Oct 08, John Vibber rated it it was amazing. When somebody tells you tells you that "the war of northern aggression" was a fight for Southern rights and not slavery; this is the book to prove them wrong. It's an outstanding addition to Civil War history. Mar 19, Curt Fox rated it really liked it Shelves: Via Goodreads First Reads: I like to consider myself a Civil War history buff, but even I, on occasion, find a book or article on an event or situation that is so granular in its focus that I find it gives me tunnel vision, and I zotz out for entire paragraphs at a time. And I will tell you that for just over half of this book, I feared I had found another such a missive.

But then things picked up, and what came forth made every bit of earlier labor well worth it. This is, on the surface, the tal Via Goodreads First Reads: This is, on the surface, the tale of Robert Bunch, a British consul stationed in Charleston, SC, for a decade or so before and then during the early part of the Civil War. His initial significance was in using his local influence to try to amend the Negro Seaman act that allowed authorities to temporarily imprison free blacks traveling into the city's port, until the ship departed, though not without the occasional illegitimate sale of said black persons.

Nut it wasn't long before his bonhomie and comfort in dealing with local pro-slavery folks made him a source of inside information for the Crown. Keep in mind, England had a great deal of stock in what took place in the soon-to-be Confederacy. They needed the cotton to keep mills in Liverpool and Manchester working, so the British economy was quite tied in with American politics.

And after Lincoln was elected, and the southern states decided on secession, those states were not shy about using King Cotton as leverage in trying to obtain official recognition from the Crown. Of course, meanwhile in the North, William Seward was threatening war for any such recognition. So it was a very precarious see-saw. And Bunch was on the middle of that see-saw. Virulently anti-slave and disgusted by what he often witnessed in Charleston, he played a strong role in convincing Carolinians he was their friend, while keeping the Foreign Office abreast of all that took place within his milieu.

Unfortunately, some of his undertakings, such as communicating with pre-war Richmond attempting to get the burgeoning government to abide by the maritime laws of the Declaration of Paris, were seen by some in the North as appeasement of the South, and ultimately played into his removal from consular status. There's a great deal of history, and for my mind, well-researched and in many cases, remarkably so. The official communications and letters Cited by author Christopher Dickey are often surprising in their breadth, and indicate an exhaustive degree of search and analysis.

There are facts I've never come across, such as Britain's connection with ardent abolitionist John Brown. And once the stage has been set in the first half of the book, you can almost hear Dickey's engine rev as he steps up the pace and the narrative weaves through matters political, economic, military, and more.

Now, it's not without its flaws, as few as they may be. I took marginal issue with some awkward phrasing and distracting tangents, but not once were they substantial enough to cause a re-read or confusion. However, as this was an uncorrected proof, I might not have seen the absolutely final version. I could long-list the highly interesting historical references and aspects dealt with in this book, many of which are surprising in their range because of the assumed central focus of the book.

Instead, I'll say that Dickey takes a creative tack and artfully connects many facts and topics that might not appear to be pertinent at first glance, and every time he is justified in including them. With a great cast provided by history and a subject of longstanding fascination for many, Dickey builds on a strong foundation and produces a tale of initially tenuous but ultimately riveting attraction. And even though that slower first half never came close to driving me away, that second half drew me in and delivered a fascinating ride. And perhaps it is just as well, in a way, that my kindle fell in the potty when I was done and with it went hundreds genuinely of notations that I made as I wended my way through it; I had procrastinated writing this review because there was so much I wanted to say.

Too much, in fact! Sometimes I have to remind myself I am writing a review for would-be readers who might want to discover a few things on their own. Part of my writing mind is still wired in the direction of academic analysis, which is too ponderous for most readers to slog through, and not really necessary for our purposes. I was riveted almost from the get-go. At first I had the bizarre notion that a British view of the Southern Rebellion would be objective. There were a couple of horrifying instances in which it might have chosen to recognize the Confederacy, but those moments quickly passed.

Even before war broke out, tension had been quietly mounting over the treatment of British seamen that landed in Charleston. On one occasion a single Black sailor had instigated a relatively small uprising on a plantation, and this act—the most fearful nightmare of the Southern ruling class, self-styled aristocrats who lived as a tiny minority among an enormous number of Black laborers who had every reason to hate them—gave birth to the Negro Seaman Act.

The law stipulated that any Black sailors from another country that worked on board a ship that docked in Charleston, must be kept in jail until it was time to leave again. This was the stuff of which international incidents were born. Britain would attempt to solve the problem through Washington, D. Eventually, a quiet negotiation began with Charleston authorities.

When they continued to behave badly, Britain had little recourse, since it did not want it known in Washington that they had been dealing with the government of South Carolina as if it were sovereign. This probably also fed the delusions of Southern grandeur and may have encouraged them to believe they did not need the national government at all. Robert Bunch was originally stationed in the north, but found himself in Charleston more and more often. Which side would Britain take?

Was he a spy? Maybe, were he on the side of the Union, he should be locked up! In order to maintain his role and save his own neck, his behavior became increasingly misleading. The dispatches he sent to England were so adamantly opposed to recognition of the Confederacy that he was reproached a time or two for trying to make policy when his job was simply to provide information. He became so convincing in his subterfuge that at one point, he was nearly brought up on charges of treason against Britain.

Secretary of State Seward, a difficult, punctilious man, had a number of bones to pick with Britain, and at one point tried to foment war with them, convinced that if it broke out, the South would drop their ridiculous posturing and rush to defend the red, white and blue. Lincoln felt differently, however, and made it clear to Seward and to Britain that he was only interested in fighting one war at a time.

Lord Palmerston, a man with power disproportionate to most in his position, had eclectic tendencies, and was having no part of firing Bunch. If the US of A had to have its capitol torched a second time to get the point as to whose navy was better? Hopefully not, but Bunch was staying. And that is how it was. There are two things that popped out at me in reading this compelling work. It was my job to teach teenagers about the American Civil War, or as much as teens can learn in ten weeks at one hour a go.

I could use my six weeks off in the summer to read whatever I chose, if I wanted to, and that was about it. So although I could have used this information back then, it is nevertheless satisfying to have one nagging question answered, however belatedly. Surely it was obvious they were living in a feudal economy that the rest of the industrializing nations had abandoned.

Surely they had to know they could not freeze history. Why cling to it beyond all reason? A number of other historians gave that reason, but it felt like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong hole. And Dickey provided me with the missing piece. When they lose that house, they lose everything. And so it was with a large number of plantation owners. They had borrowed against their slaves.

Montreal, City of Secrets

That was where their equity was: If they allowed the government to buy their slaves at their current market value, they would become bankrupt, and having gained their social standing on nothing more than wealth and pale pigmentation, they would be ruined socially and financially.

As long as there was any other choice, they would take it. They would send their own sons to die for it, though generally they chose to pay someone else to go in their own places. I had wondered, in past years, whether Britain might not have yearned for the South to become independent. If one looks at a map of the USA as it was then, and the size of British possession of Canada, if it also dominated the Southern USA economically, and if it had a navy in the Atlantic that could pound the coastline, could it not overturn the American revolution?

That slice of the Union is small compared to Canada, when the Confederate states are added in like the bottom bun of a hamburger. Not so, says Dickey.

Britain had other fish to fry. It had been absorbed in fighting the Crimean War, and at the time, events in Europe were considered vastly more important than our own emerging outpost. To the impertinent Southern men and women that sashayed up to their representatives to announce that Britain would simply have to recognize them, the response was generally somewhat courteous, muted, non-committal. If pressed, they suggested that cotton could indeed be grown in India.

And here I am three pages later according to Microsoft, and I have really only skimmed the surface.

Believe me when I say I have just scratched the surface. This magnificent book comes out July 21, For once I can tell you that whether or not you are conversant with the finer details of the American Civil War, you will be able to read this with no trouble. Conti returned as composer, with Kevin Connor directing, Jacques R. Marquette as cinematographer, and a script by Heyes and Richard Fielder. This release also included a bonus featurette with John Jakes and David Wolper talking about the books and the miniseries; James Read, Lesley-Anne Down, and Patrick Swayze discussing their characters; general thoughts of other cast and crew members; plus information about the historical background and trials of its reconstruction for the miniseries.

All volumes were sold as separate boxes, but later on they were also available in one box.

It includes the following tracks from North and South: The entire score to North and South: Highlights , a minute disc featuring selections from the first miniseries score, was released. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the American miniseries. For the originating novels, see North and South trilogy. For other uses, see North and South. November 3, Book II: May 4, Book III: North and South Retrieved January 5, Retrieved March 9, The Post and Courier. Based on original archival research and his previous books on the Civil War, Barry Sheehy challenges core tenets of the American Civil War narrative.

Moreover, his case is greatly reinforced by the many photos taken by internationally celebrated photographer William Notman. Barry Sheehy is an award-winning author of six books. His most recent, Savannah: Immortal City , was featured at the prestigious Savannah Book Fair. His writings have appeared in historical and business publications worldwide. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States. She lives in Amarillo, Texas.

Confederate Operations in Montreal During the American Civil War

It has received too little attention from historians — One of the most important keys to understanding John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is the role of the Confederate operations in Montreal. It has received too little attention from historians — until now. Barry Sheehy lays out the case for the involvement of the Confederates in a concise and convincing manner showing once and for all that Booth could not have carried out his plot without their direct help.

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