My wife turned me onto Christopher Dickey’s Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South, and I’m about halfway through it. It’s pretty good: OMIC is Robert Bunch, British consul in Charleston for the 1850s and 1860s. And oh, but did he have Views about the antebellum South in general, and South Carolina in particular. Dickey’s writing is accurate in the parts I already knew about, which presumably means he’s decently sound on the topic in general, and the book itself is well-written. Go ahead and check it out.