The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson published by Crown 592 pages (2024)
I had read at least a dozen books on the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12 and 13, 1861 before I ever visited it. While many of the books looked at the fight there that April morning as an ordinary battle, some of the others told a story about the people people who were immediately involved in the shelling. My attention was drawn to the tension over what would be the start of a war which took 700,000 American lives.
Back a quarter century ago, I visited the fort with my late wife and two children, one of whom was autistic. The recorded narrative on the boat ride to the fort had some questionable Lost Cause themes that even my ten-year old autistic son pointed out just were not true. The day before our voyage, my family and I had joined a Charleston community celebration of July 4 down by the river where we enjoyed a Low Country Boil made up of corn, crab, shrimp, sausages, and potatoes. It was a marvelous celebration of the city’s diverse American culture. The narration on the ferry was an all-white version of the story of Sumter.
That morning trip to Sumter we heard about “states’ rats” and the need to break up America on the ferry from the recorded narration supplied by the private company that transported us over.
After visiting Fort Sumter, I always read new works on it, hoping that the writer goes beyond the Lost Cause narrative of the ferry’s announcer. For such a small battle, it has occupied scores of historians and history writers over the last 163 years. Some are pretty good, and other seem lost inside the Cult of Carolina.
I was happy to see that Erik Larson had a new book coming out on the crisis around Fort Sumter. One of my favorite popular history books is Isaac’s Storm, a retelling of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane that Larson released in 2000. Larson’s compelling writing kept me reading page after page of an event that I knew little about. Larson makes every page in his books raise questions for the reader that you want to find out the answers to. The Demon of Unrest follows this pattern.
The book gives a moment-by-moment view of South Carolina on the precipice of war. Even before Lincoln’s election in November of 1860, Larson tells in-detail the machinations of the political elite of South Carolina to take the state out of the United States. The Union commander, Major Robert Anderson, knows soon after Lincoln wins his election that he and the men under his command are the principal targets not only of the South Carolina forces arrayed around the harbor, but of the six other rapidly seceding states that joined the Confederacy before a shot is fired. Anderson commands several fortifications, but he decided to give up the others and to sneak his forces into Fort Sumter.
With just over eighty men under his command, Anderson’s force was outnumbered by the civilian construction workers from Charleston in the fortifications “completing” the defenses. His predecessor thought that the workers could easily overpower the Federal forces if they were properly aroused! On the other hand, Anderson was a native Kentuckian who had owned slaves and he was very good at getting his now-enemies to reveal information about their plans. While the Major sympathized with the objections of the new Confederates, he remained true to the United States.
Unfortunately, as Larson points out, that was not true of many people in the army or in the Buchanan Administration. For four months the old regime would deal with the crisis in Charleston Harbor with a confluence of leaving Major Anderson without support while turning over other fortifications and supplies to the new slave holders republic whose capital was in Montgomery, Alabama.
While the Deep South was seceding, ordinary life went on in Charleston. Larson tells the tale of a January 9, 1860 sale of a “Prime Gang of 235 Negroes.” Would anyone buy Black men, women, and children with the fate of slavery being projected onto the national stage? Of course they would, In fact slavery seemed unthreatened by the potential military conflict that sales were made with 50% cash down and a 50% mortgage to be paid in the next year. Ryan’s Mart for slaves included these children according to Larson; “Chloe, eight months old, from a family of three, and Aesop, five months, from a family of seven. His parents, Caroline and Witty, and siblings Charlotte, fifteen; Cupid, eleven; Robert, six; and Peter, three; were also up for sale.”
Larson uses two advocates of secession to give the human background to the Southern states leaving the Union. James Henry Hammond had been the governor of South Carolina and represented the state in the United States Senate. He was accused by Wade Hampton of molesting his teenaged sisters and he had taken a slave woman as his concubine and raped his own daughter. Two decades before the war broke out, Hammond was already pressing the Post Office to stop delivering missives that were critical of slavery.
The other voice for succession is Edmund Ruffin. A former politician of Virginia, he travelled the East Coast of the South to stir up militant secession fever, all the while being ignored by his home state. When the time came to begin the bombardment of Sumter, he was allowed to fire one of the first shots. He encouraged his sons to fight for the Confederacy, but he was embarrassed when his son ran away during an engagement. At the end of the war, Ruffin committed suicide. He left this note behind in his diary:
And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will [be] near to my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.
While Hammond and Ruffin made things happen during the Secession Crisis, they were both mentally and morally unstable, yet they were treated as heroes proclaiming the new age for the South. If Sumter was the Lexington of this Second Revolution, these were the Confederacy’s George Washington and Thomas Jefferson of the Civil War.
While the Secessionist politicians were surrounding Fort Sumter with increasingly bitter foes, Anderson’s principal authority was John Buchanan Floyd, the Secretary of War under President Buchanan. Floyd used his remaining time in office to help the Confederacy and he would become a Confederate General when the war began. Floyd wrote a letter to Anderson telling him on December 23, 1860 that:
“Under these instructions, you might infer that you are required to make a vain and useless sacrifice of your own life and the lives of the men under your command, upon a mere point of honor. This is far from the President’s intentions.”
In other words, the Secretary of War was discouraging Anderson’s resistance to the threats posed by the Confederates against his fort and the United States. Anderson, according to Larson, smelled treason in the letter.
While the Confederate leaders felt that Anderson was in their hands, the Major’s surprise move to vacate Fort Moultrie told them that whatever their influence with the Buchanan Administration took a back seat to the decision-making prowess of Anderson.
In January, the ship the Star of the West appeared to bring supplies to Anderson’s command. While many people think that the April attack on Sumter started the Civil War, the Confederate batteries opened fire on this Federal ship three months earlier. According to Larson, the Confederates appeared to hope that Sumter would open up in response to the peril the ship was in, bringing on the war before Lincoln could take office. However, Anderson resisted initiating the war.
In Mississippi, the leadership of the state pressed for it to be the next state to secede. In its explanation of why it was taking such a drastic step, the convention published its justification:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” they wrote in their official declaration. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
In response to the declaration, Larson says, “Buchanan did nothing.”
William Seward, who had occupied the high ground on slavery during the 1850s, on January 11, 1861 adopted a more conciliatory approach in which he called for a Constitutional amendment blocking Congress from interfering with slavery in the states which already had it in exchange for stopping the breakaway slaveholders’ republic. Lincoln told his supporters that “I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right…” As the war became closer to being a reality, even some anti-slavery politicians were taken in by in-fighting around compromise. Seward’s own family dissented, with his wife writing to him “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best.”
While we tend to look back at these events of 1860 and 1861 as primarily military and policy crisis, Larson also presents the human cost of taking America into its darkest period in our history.
Meanwhile, in Montgomery, Alabama the Confederacy got its first, and only, president. Jefferson Davis was sworn into office in a city where half the people were against the purposes of the Confederacy. Montgomery had a population of 8,000 which even back then made it a very small city to be the capital of anything. Nearly half of the population was enslaved. You may ask yourself how could Davis have confidence in Southern white resistance to the power of the United States, yet within the white supremacist Weltanschauung, everything that the United States was came out of Southern leadership and Southern finance. Without the South, the United States would be a lost vessel.
Alexis Coe gave a harshly negative review of the book in the New York Times. Coe says that:
“…there was something lacking in the book’s 565 pages: Nary a Black person, free or enslaved, is presented as more than a fleeting, one-dimensional figure. Frederick Douglass, a leading abolitionist and standard of histories of the era, warrants no more than a mention.”
After reading that passage from Coe, a friend told me that he would not read the book because it sounded like a product of the Lost Cause School of Civil War historiography. Quite honestly, by the end of the book I wondered why there were not more Black people quoted in the story, but it is not Lost Cause propaganda. In fact, Larson is very clear in what motivated the secession of the seven states that tried to leave the Union before Lincoln was inaugurated and the effect on Southern white ideology of the primary means for the elite to get richer. Larson also gives readers less than familiar with pre-emancipation treatment of African Americans an unvarnished view of the horrors inflicted in both the South and the North. Still, the author should have explored the attitudes of Black people as the crisis developed and the impact of it on the 90% of Black Americans held in slavery.
There was another missing voice here in the book. By the end of the war, more than a quarter of Union forces were born elsewhere. These immigrants were commenting on Sumter extensively and Larson missed his opportunity to include their voices. Immigrants gave a higher percentage of their manpower to the Union army than did native-born, and they made up a sizeable percentage of the soldiers holed-up in Fort Sumter during the first months of 1861. Yet, with just two exceptions, they largely are not heard from. And while Larson does tell the heartrending story of the first two men killed in the war, he does not mention that both of these United States soldiers were Irish immigrants.
Finally, I like Mary Chestnut’s “Diary” but other female voices could have been given more prominence. The “diary” was reworked after the war, so it is more like a memoir in the stylistic form of a diary and may not tell us exactly how Chestnut reacted in 1861. But Mary Chestnut provides the voice of Southern women in the book.
Overall the book is definitely a page turner for both the students of the Civil War and for the general reader. If you have a friend who is interested in the war, but has yet to pick up a book, this is a good place for him to get his introduction into what has made you a lifelong reader about this conflict.
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