On August 13 the Confederate Congress resolved approval of the Declaration of Paris except for the article on privateering[353].

Bunch took great pride in the secrecy observed.

"I do not see how any clue is given to the way in which the Resolutions have been procured....

We made a positive stipulation that France and England were not to be alluded to in the event of the compliance of the Confederate Govt.[354]," he wrote Lyons on August 16.
But he failed to take account either of the penetrating power of mouth-to-mouth gossip or of the efficacy of Seward's secret agents.

On this same day, August 16, Lyons reported the arrest in New York, on the fourteenth, of one Robert Mure, just as he was about to take passage for Liverpool carrying a sealed bag from the Charleston consulate to the British Foreign Office, as well as some two hundred private letters.