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Prequel of the Civil War: The Demon of Unrest
If you haven’t read Erik Larson’s latest book on the Civil War, you will probably think I’m hallucinating when I say the book is intimate, delightful and enlightening. I have read my share of books on the Civil War, which usually focus on
Abraham Lincoln and the incredibly difficult decisions he had to make; on Ulysses S. Grant who was beleaguered early on with military losses, but ultimately was victorious; the strategies with which the war was fought; and the tragic loss of lives on both sides.
But Larson’s book takes us into a new realm of understanding about the conflict.
The Demon of Unrest invites us into the period before the Civil War began. Larson’s extensive research tells us about the personalities who were key to the confusion around attacking or evacuating Fort Sumter. The people of Charleston became “spectators” as they watched the skirmishes unfold. He doesn’t ignore Lincoln’s role, but shares Lincoln’s bewilderment about the controversy over slavery and secession that existed:
To Lincoln all this rancor was a mystery. He could not fathom South Carolina’s reaction. An election had taken place; he had won; America’s greatest democratic tradition had been upheld. At no time had he threatened to abolish slavery or emancipate the millions of enslaved men and women who populated the plantations of the South. But fire-eaters and secessionist editors had portrayed him as seeking exactly that.
James Buchanan, the president in office before Lincoln, was depicted as ineffectual; he appeared to want to wash his hands of the whole secession problem and dump it in Lincoln’s lap. Which is precisely what he did.
Once Lincoln was in office, his Secretary of State, William Seward, believed he was more qualified than Lincoln to determine how to respond to current events. He repeatedly took action without consulting Lincoln. He was convinced that the secession of states would lose its power on the Southern population and would blow over in due time. Lincoln believed the same thing for a period of time, until he sent representatives to Charleston to assess the situation. He discovered that secession sentiments were overwhelming and gaining steam. When Seward told Lincoln that he (Seward) was the best person to take charge of events, Lincoln finally realized how Seward was trying to sabotage him and declared it was his own job as president to take charge.
Other characters were featured in Larson’s rendition of the story: Edmund Ruffin, who felt it was his job to rally the states to declare secession. He loved the attention that people gave him as he appeared at state conventions to support this charge. People were fond of this older statesman, and they occasionally indulged his ego:
Out of sympathy or pity, Ruffin was invited by various gun crews to fire their cannon, and so the old secessionist, musket in hand, made his way from gun to gun, drawing cheers as cannon boomed and smoke billowed and projectiles of all configurations flew toward Sumter at seventeen hundred feet per second. He was a popular cannoneer; in all he fired guns twenty-seven times.
Then there was Major Robert Anderson in charge of the garrison at Fort Sumter, a virtuous and principled man, who was stymied repeatedly by the lack of communication from Lincoln. Was Lincoln going to resupply Fort Sumter, where they were nearly out of food? Was he going to evacuate the fort? Communications were also delayed and confused because there were few secure ways to communicate: people in charge didn’t trust the telegraph; letters could take days to be received, to and from the fort; the weather could cause delays in the delivery of messages; and the darkness of night carried its own benefits and limitations for both sides. When Anderson finally learned that he was going to be re-supplied, it was essentially too late: the Confederate Army was already attacking the fort with armaments that had been set up all around the Bay.
And then there is Mary Chesnut, who kept a diary allowing us to follow events from her personal point of view. Her “flirtation” with one of the Charleston men was apparently a somewhat acceptable distraction, although her husband didn’t approve. But a flirtation was a better alternative than a sexual dalliance.
Many other cultural norms were shared in the book: the perception of slavery in the South and in the North; the courtesies extended during warfare; the acknowledgments and honoring of both sides during the early fighting.
Still, Erik Larson doesn’t suggest that the Civil War wasn’t a tragedy:
The ‘expiation’ Lee had feared, what Mary Lincoln called ‘this hideous nightmare,’ had come to pass, killing 750,000 Americans. South Carolina alone lost 21,000 men, more than a third of the 60,000 state citizens who fought. Its planters grieved a more venal loss: The end of slavery cost them three hundred million dollars in human capital overnight.
Ultimately, the country was reunited. The slaves were emancipated. But at a terrible cost to its citizens and to the nation.
Published in War
It is a wonderful book. Throwing out the warning that there are two stupid preface pages that compare 1/6/21 to the events in the book, but that idiocy never comes up again.
I really enjoy Larson’s books, and I thank you for bringing this one in front of my eyes. Sounds great!
I guess I missed that! Just as well!
I like his books a lot, too. I will always remember his reflections on the hurricane in Galveston. Unbelievably horrible.
I usually prefer my history to be semi-fictional. I suppose it is because I prefer original sources for the actual history. Bernard Cornwell (known best for Sharpe’s Rifles) wrote an excellent series about the Civil War that starts with the book Rebel and continues with three more. Cornwell does excellent research and imbues his fictional and non-fictional characters with detail that helps one understand them.
I agree that “semi-fictional” can add a lot to our reading experience. I think that Larson had so many fascinating and eccentric people to choose from (and I only mentioned a couple) that I was quite satisfied.
I haven’t read the book, just your review. Does this indicate that the movement to secede was driven by more than just abolition?
And Secretaries of State were meddling in domestic affairs even then, unless Seward was treating the Confederate States as a foreign nation.
I am hoping Gary Larson comes out with a Civil War book.
Lincoln said nothing early on about eliminating slavery, although the abolitionists were loud and insistent. But the Southerners were convinced that was precisely what he would do. Once the war progressed, Lincoln knew that he had to abolish slavery after all.
Not at all. Seward thought the whole thing on secession would blow over and the country (including the South) would be preserved without a war. An interesting series of events was when the Confederacy appointed commissioners to talk to Lincoln about their decisions to secede. Of course, Seward knew that Lincoln would never speak to or acknowledge them. So he just kept stalling on them. It was something to imagine.
I think it more appropriate to say Southern leaders rather than Southerners which makes it sound like the people were informed. Similar to what we face today. Don’t take that as criticism of your response that I think is basically correct.
No problem. Although I wonder if people were better informed than folks are today. The people in the South were terrified that their slaves would be freed, so the larger population may have actually known what their leaders were up to. I wonder if anyone knows if the discussions were widely known. I suspect they knew why they were going to go to war.
“James Buchanan, the president in office before Lincoln, was depicted as ineffectual…” – I will claim no real scholarship of President Buchanan but, from what little I do know, the use of this highlighted word seems a bit too kind.
I have another Bruce Catton Civil War trilogy near the top of my “next to read” list. (Got all 3 for $20 a few months ago at Half Price Books.) The first book is The Coming Fury (1961)…in time I expect to be able to compare the current telling (Larson) to my general preference for the old book. Thanks for the report.
Thanks for the recommendation Susan. I also appreciate the trigger warning from @eustacecscrubb because there are so many stupid comparisons to January 6. Erik Larson is a talented writer. His book Devil in the White City was enjoyable and chilling. In the Garden of Beasts presents such a personal look at what happened in Hiter’s Germany that I could hardly put it down. Because of the reported January 6 stuff I boycotted it but your recommendation inspired me to download the Audible version.
I am a Civil War buff. My latest favorite book on the CW is The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi. It is so fun as this Union Cavalry unit goes behind enemy lines being mistaken for a Confederate unit, getting opposed by local militias, being chased and having several close calls. It’s a fun, fun book. There was a John Wayne movie loosely based on it but the real story would make a great flick.
Yes, Buchanan was awful, but a better word escaped me.
Yes, 1775 is excellent. (I am also reading a recent bio of Samuel Adams…so far, it is a very good primer of that era too.)
Biographies are probably my favorite read. Such a great way of learning about the periods they lived in.
That said, war was inevitable.
Even if Lincoln was not planning any specific action, his new Republican Party was the first to put an express call for abolition in the party platform. Southerners were not wrong to see the handwriting on the wall.
My southern ancestors tended to indulge in revisionist accounts in which everybody conceded that the establishment of slavery was wrong–the issue was what to do about it. The Civil War generation had inherited a problem–3 million people four generations deep in slave life who could not be expected to hack it in the complex white world if suddenly released–there would be chaos and a one-sided race war in which white people who grew up hearing about bloody slave revolts in the Caribbean islands would likely overreact to provocations of any kind and indulge in reprisals. Yankee do-gooders like Lincoln were not really thinking about the well-being of the Negro if they believed in sudden abolition. Therefore, a gradual transition was required (and here is the revisionist part) and was already underway.
A fascinating take on the situation, OB. Thanks.
A lot of rationalizing and revisionism on that take.
He did say indulging in revisionist accounts…
I think the perceptions about the likely effect of sudden emancipation were widely shared. They might point to Nat Turner’s rebellion as the likely outcome of sudden freedom.
Washington, Jefferson and the Southern Founders seemed to think that once the ideals of the American Revolution were lived and sunk in, slavery would be an obvious contradiction such that conversion to limited indenture, wage-workers etc would begin on its own. The outlawing of further import of slaves in the same year the British outlawed the Atlantic slave trade (without freeing any currently enslaved people in their lucrative sugar plantations) and the ban on slavery in the Northwest Territories reflected that mindset.
And then some clever Yankee SOB invented the cotton gin, changed the economics of cotton, creating a huge global market for it and a concomitant sudden demand for slave labor from Georgia to Texas. The South was locked in, trapped by new technology combined with bad old practices.
I guess the reality of what happened clouds my judgement of the pre-emancipation fears. But, just maybe, the perception/fears are just excuse making after-the-fact for immoral profiteering. I am not going to do the research to figure it out. I suspect that there are many scholarly landmines like looking back at 2020 and trying to figure out what Covid fears were valid and what were based on propaganda.
There is no question that the incentive for rationalizing was immense. Doesn’t mean they did not believe it.
The initial romantic appeal of the KKK (lots of white-collar founders who bailed once occupying federal troops started arresting members-like Nathan Bedford Forest bailed) was the accepted certainty that emancipation was an inherent dire threat to Southern womanhood regardless of statistical realities. The convenience of the belief that there was some inborn savage tendency being kept in check thus providing moral justification for the continuation of slavery does not obviate the possibility that it was sincerely held. History is full of examples of peoples drinking their own Kool Aid.
There were 7 million white people, 3 million blacks in the South. The number of whites with a direct interest in slavery was not large. Ranging from dowagers with a single servant to that one plantation in SC that had 3,000 slaves, the number of slaveholders was relatively small. Persuading the non-rich white majority that Lincoln would unleash the whirlwind required some pre-existing beliefs about the consequences of abolition.
History is repeating.
I don’t think that this is true at all.
Have you read his “House Divided” speech? The whole thing is here. Here is the opening:
That speech was June 16, 1858. He seems quite clear, to me.
So, I think that Larson’s claim, quoted in the OP — that “At no time had he threatened to abolish slavery or emancipate the millions of enslaved men and women who populated the plantations of the South” — is simply false.
Perhaps it’s not a lie. Perhaps Larson is simply so ignorant of American history that he didn’t know what Lincoln said. In one of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, no less. And somehow, the editors didn’t catch it either.
The fundamental problem is that Lincoln was quite a, shall we say, prevaricator himself. And a fearmonger, as expressed in the same quote above, suggesting to Northerners that somehow slavery could spread into their states, despite the North’s superior numbers in both the House and Senate.
As usual, Jerry, the quote you included from me has nothing to do with your argument. He did not threaten to abolish slavery. He said in his speech that at some point, the issue would need to be resolved one way or another; the country could not remain divided over the issue, but he was not making that decision at that time. The people, he assumed, would make that decision. As things turned out, he was ultimately put in a position, due to secession and the war, to emancipate the slaves.