The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, by Erik Larson (Penguin, 592 pages, $35)
O n February 22, 1861, Abraham Lincoln visited Philadelphia. En route to Washington, D.C., where he would take the oath of office and commence his duties as the 16th president of the United States, amid rumors of plotted assassination, the rail-splitter-turned-lawyer from Illinois visited the historic site from which patriots had declared 13 free and independent states in America. Drawn to Philadelphia for its historic significance, Lincoln also sought inspiration for the monumental task ahead: Since his November 1860 election on the Republican ticket, seven slaveholding states had severed political ties with the United States. Insurrectionists there had seized federal property. With the corruptible and ineffectual James Buchanan leaving office, the problems fell on Lincoln’s shoulders. These events, and the national conflagration that ensued, form the historical centerpiece of Erik Larson’s latest literary masterwork.
At Independence Hall, where the signers of 1776 had pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to securing political independence, a large crowd gathered. Onlookers urged the president-elect to give a speech. Lincoln spoke off the proverbial cuff. Building from remarks he gave in response to the notorious Dred Scott decision, Lincoln expounded on themes that would influence his executive policies until his death in 1865: first, his love of the Declaration of Independence, and second, how it was that the Declaration, not the Constitution, was the founding political text of the United States.
“I never had a feeling politically that did not spring from sentiments embodied in the Declaration,” Lincoln declared. He explained to the crowd why this curious fact was of profound significance, especially in a moment of political crisis that threatened to escalate into war. The first principle of liberty emanating from the Declaration, in Lincoln’s view, gave “hope to the world for all future time.” Its foundational assertion, borne of the self-evident truth that women, children, and men possess God-given, unalienable rights, promised a future in which, “in due time, the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”
Lincoln championed a vision of American meritocracy and, though narrow, still a more expansive view of human equality than was then fashionable. Lincoln then posed a troubling question: “Can this country be saved upon that basis?” To thunderous applause, he scaled a platform in front of Independence Hall and raised an American flag into the crisp February air. Yet the ominousness of Lincoln’s question — and its significance for the nation’s future — was unmistakable.
It was so unmistakable that the United States from 1861 to 1865 fought a fratricidal civil war that claimed, in the final accounting, some 750,000 lives. “All knew,” Lincoln said on another memorable occasion, that the cause of this suffering was plain: South Carolina and the deep southern states sought through extralegal secession and insurrection to dissolve the federal compact. And as decades of scholarship have demonstrated, the radical South seceded to preserve racial slavery and create an oligarchical society dedicated, in the chilling but telling words of Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, to the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
In fact, Thomas Jefferson and his peers, Stephens went on to declare, were naïve to have believed in the equality of the races, and in the gradual, natural, and eventual demise of slavery: “Those ideas were fundamentally wrong,” he declared. So dedicated were the framers of the Confederate cause to securing textual legal protections for slavery that, congregated in Montgomery, Ala., they copied (almost verbatim and with limited substantive variations) the old U.S. Constitution but grafted into the new text definitive protections for slavery — ironic emendations, since many Americans prior to 1861 insisted, as many continue to insist, that the original U.S. Constitution had codified slavery in national law.
But secession and a treasonous government did not ipso facto provoke armed conflict. For that, Lincoln could point to the insurrectionists of Charleston, S.C., who made “war rather than let the nation survive” when they fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. While he does not recapitulate academic arguments on the history of slavery in the republic or on the sectional crisis, Larson, the international best-selling author and a master writer of suspense and tragedy, nevertheless offers in his latest work a close look at slavery, antebellum Charleston, and the cause of the War of the Rebellion. The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War continues the author’s line of hugely successful historical nonfiction. Like the other books for which he is known — In the Garden of Beasts, Dead Wake, and The Splendid and the Vile (to name but a few) — The Demon of Unrest weaves together dramatic narratives and human stories to form an expansive and vibrant tapestry.
Readers familiar with this era of American history meet the usual cast of characters: the salacious James Henry Hammond, born into South Carolina’s poor white cracker culture but married into the faux chivalry of Carolina plantocracy; Harriet Beecher Stowe, the little woman whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin begot the big war; Mary Boykin Chesnut, the famed diarist, swept up in southern high society, flirtatious, blissfully engaged at soirées and in gossip, and insulated from the horrors of slavery from which she derived immense wealth; the professional and stolid Winfield Scott, commanding general of the U.S. Army and, in 1861, the greatest general officer (after George Washington) ever to wear the uniform of his country; the dutiful Robert Anderson, major, U.S. Army, a southerner by birth and no stranger to the region’s peculiar honor culture, who moved his command from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter on his own initiative; and, of course, Edmund Ruffin, the deranged and nigh-demonic fire-eater of Virginia whose personal life afforded little joy, but for whom the prospect of war to establish a slaveholding republic scintillated and vivified. There are notable others whom Larson skillfully humanizes, such as the political operator and schemer William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state.
The Demon of Unrest offers more than exceptional character development and riveting descriptions of the battle for Fort Sumter: Its author hits his stride in evoking the dark, sensuous trappings of antebellum and Civil War–era Charleston high society. Indeed, Larson shines in exposing the amoral contradictions of southern slaveholders and the world they sought to preserve. Planters such as Hammond demonstrated aristocratic aspirations but lacked the nobility and virtue of old, European lineages. Convinced that slavery had evolved, in John C. Calhoun’s perverse formulation, from a necessary evil to a “positive good,” slaveholders lauded the institution for the paternal care it purportedly afforded slaves, whose humanity they denied, often invoking the authority and rationality of pseudo-natural philosophy, and whose bodies they abused, satisfying base urges (and increasing the slave population with their own offspring).
In the age of telegraphy, southern elites could near-instantaneously parse out, line by line, what the president-elect said he would and, as importantly, would not do to the institution of slavery where it existed. Nevertheless, they embraced victimology. Besieged by a hostile “Black Republican” administration, they convinced themselves of the necessity to reduce a U.S. Army coastal fortification erected to afford their highly racialized society the full protecting power of the federal government.
Full of boasting in foretelling future military glories, and eager for war with the North, white men constituting the Charleston militia lacked the firepower, technical expertise, and capability initially to seize Forts Moultrie and Sumter and even wanted for the capacity to erect batteries and gun emplacements themselves, resorting, of necessity, to slave labor, foreshadowing the limits and critical vulnerabilities of future Confederate artillery and logistics. Finally, for all their bravado, and despite an honor ethic that prescribed rituals for the violent defense of honor (the Code Duello, which served as the standard rulebook for dueling and dueling etiquette in antebellum southern society, is the organizing motif of Larson’s book), southern slaveholders were small, defensive, emotional, and hypersensitive men who, as Charles Sumner discovered, carried big sticks.
Engagingly written and fraught with tension — the author brilliantly depicts the maddening isolation of U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Sumter and the difficulties of being cut off, as Anderson was, from communication with the administration in Washington — The Demon of Unrest will add to Larson’s luster as one of the great historical-nonfiction writers of our time. The book will certainly appeal to enthusiasts of Civil War history, who are legion. It would perhaps be unfair, using the standards and conventions of historical scholarship, to scrutinize The Demon of Unrest. But even on these terms, the book holds its own. Larson engages with the pertinent primary sources. The bibliographical section reflects the consultation and integration of important secondary works in the field. There are notable omissions: One is Charles Dew’s field-shaping Apostles of Disunion, which chronicles the political activism of secession commissioners from the deep slaveholding states; another is Carl Paulus’s important but overlooked The Slaveholding Crisis, which details how southern planters of the chivalry feared the specter of brutal slave insurrection and mass murder on their plantations. Larson in The Demon of Unrest draws liberally from and develops these themes — indeed, they are essential to the book’s narrative arc — and the exclusion of these works, while doubtless unintentional, is nevertheless problematic.
Writing near the conclusion of his campaign through the Carolinas, General William Tecumseh Sherman of the U.S. Army — certainly no abolitionist — noted that, before the war, so long as southerners abided the United States Constitution, northerners bore a legal obligation to honor southerners’ claims to property in slaves. “But when the South violated that compact openly, publicly, and violently,” Sherman continued, “it was absurd to suppose that we were bound to respect that kind of property, or any kind of property,” as the South demanded. In the end, the “counterrevolution of 1861” begun at Fort Sumter to maintain racial slavery consumed itself in fire and destroyed the southern plantocracy. Evil men who plotted treason against the government and inaugurated war, ecstatic with passion and maddened with lust of profit, proved, in the final analysis, enslaved to King Cotton and powerless against the great citizen-soldiers and U.S. Army commanders of the North.
Edmund Ruffin, fanatical for secession, pulled the lanyards to 27 artillery pieces aimed at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Four years later, he pulled the trigger to a rifle in his mouth, manifesting in his despair and ruin the obliteration of the slaveholders’ power. Indeed, two of the tragic warnings of the War of the Rebellion — truths Larson seems to whisper in his “saga of hubris” and “heartbreak” — were recognized by religiously minded southerners (who grounded defenses of slavery in biblical hermeneutics) much too late, if these warnings dawned on them at all: God will not be mocked, and those who live by the sword die by its blade.