Quotes from Christopher Dickey

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.

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.

Two people died for every one who made it to the auction block, he said.

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

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.

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.

In the 1840s, after Charles Dickens toured the United States, he linked the American inclination to bloodshed with the barbarity of slavery.

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.