The Washington Post reviews Erik Larson’s new book The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, about the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. The review was written by Adam Goodheart who himself is a popular writer on Civil War history. Here are some excerpts from the review:
…“As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera,” Larson writes in “The Demon of Unrest,” “I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration. … I realized that the anxiety, anger, and astonishment that I felt would certainly have been experienced in 1860-1861 by vast numbers of Americans.”
Although the book’s subtitle promises a Civil War “saga” — suggesting an epic sweep across years and battles — this isn’t quite right. Rather, as he has done artfully in his previous books (which have together sold some 10 million copies), Larson zooms in tightly on a specific place, time and small group of actors whose individual dramas are supposed to encapsulate broader historical events. His main narrative ends before the war’s first drop of blood has been shed.
The object of Larson’s concentrated focus is the five-month period between Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, in November 1860, and the surrender of Fort Sumter by a small federal garrison, which had held on while surrounding Southern states proclaimed their secession from the Union. Meanwhile, leaders in Washington and the nascent Confederacy maneuvered to determine the fate of the South Carolina outpost, the last significant bastion of federal authority in the rebel South. The fort finally struck its colors on April 13, after two days of relentless artillery bombardment by Confederate forces encircling Charleston Harbor, a battle that nonetheless concluded with only a few minor injuries on each side.
Perhaps no other historian has ever rendered the struggle for Sumter in such authoritative detail as Larson does here. Having picked his way through a vast labyrinth of primary and secondary sources (some of them contradictory), he emerges with a narrative that strides confidently from one chapter to the next. Few historians, too, have done a better job of untangling the web of intrigues and counter-intrigues that helped provoke the eventual attack and surrender — how a few slightly different decisions by leaders on both sides could have led to dramatically different outcomes in the secession crisis, ones that might not have involved a war at all.
Larson begins each section of his book with an epigraph taken from a 19th-century manual on the intricate protocols of dueling. This points to a central theme: that the Sumter contest was a match of strength and wits by gentlemen on both sides whose behavior was governed not just by differing strategies and ideologies, but by a strict sense of honor.
Yet it also points to some of the book’s deficiencies. Larson’s Civil War is a “mano a mano” between a few elite White men in Washington and Charleston, while the other 30 million Americans remain a vague offstage presence. This is despite the fact that the rapidly shifting tides of public opinion in both North and South ultimately determined the course of the Sumter standoff — just as much as, or even more than, the political leaders’ thrusts and parries. It’s also an odd choice given Larson’s initial claim that his narrative was shaped by the storming of the Capitol — as if he had seen that recent moment as simply a test of wits between President Donald Trump on one side and President-elect Joe Biden on the other.
Black Americans are almost always treated as an unnamed, undifferentiated mass of passive victims: Although Larson unmasks the cruelty and hypocrisy of wealthy White enslavers, Frederick Douglass appears just once in the book’s 500 pages. Other Black activists, authors and strategists never do. Abolitionists (White as well as Black) are hardly mentioned, and then only as radical irritants to both sides whose inconvenient existence inflamed the tensions that led to disunion. In this sense, “The Demon of Unrest” sometimes reads more like a product of the 1920s than of the 2020s.
Even in his portrayals of the White elite, Larson makes puzzling choices. Very early in the book, he devotes more than 30 pages to the prewar life of a loathsome planter turned senator, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, seeming to set him up as one of the narrative’s major characters. But then Hammond largely disappears, popping up just a few times in passing.
Overall, the Confederate figures in Larson’s book are more fully fleshed out than those above the Mason-Dixon Line, with the sole exception of Lincoln. It’s difficult to find new things to say about the 16th president, but Larson has an eye for the illuminating detail. For instance, he describes a “yard sale” of household goods (including six chairs, a mattress and some comforters) that the Lincolns held in early 1861 to help fund their train journey to the inauguration. It’s a sign of just how middle-class the family was, a stark contrast to nearly all who occupied the White House before or since.
The most fascinating character in “The Demon of Unrest” is Maj. Robert Anderson, the reserved, gray-haired U.S. Army officer who held Fort Sumter for half a year, despite the vast military superiority of his massing Confederate foes and the feeble, vacillating support of the Buchanan administration. A Kentuckian and former enslaver, Anderson nonetheless did his duty, knowing that — in the words of another officer at the fort, Abner Doubleday — “the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world.” A willing withdrawal from Sumter, meanwhile, would have signaled the federal government’s acquiescence to secession and possibly sealed the nation’s dissolution.
The portrait of Anderson is Larson at his best. It is also a reminder of the intricate contingencies of history, whose outcomes do sometimes depend — at least partly — on the decisions of a single person.
