The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading now thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 U.S. Census listed 440 South Carolina planters who each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district, this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10.2. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves.

The 1860 census found that the state had 111,000 more enslaved people than it did whites; it was, moreover, one of only two states where this kind of imbalance existed, the other being Mississippi.

To outsiders, South Carolina seemed to have fallen out of step with the nation’s great march into what many called the Railroad Age.

In 1800, Charleston was the fifth-largest city in the United States; by 1860, the twenty-second.

“But when commerce, manufacturers, the mechanic arts disturbed this condition of things, and amassed wealth that could pretend to more lavish luxury than planting, then came in, I fear, this demon of unrest which has been the utmost sole disturber of the land for years past.”

Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina had retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.

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.

At least ten of the largest slaveholders came from Europe, mainly England, Ireland, and France; many were Northerners by birth, including a particularly ruthless slaveholder who came from Portland, Maine. At least twenty-eight planters went to Harvard for some level of education, another eighteen to Princeton. Fifteen of the largest slaveholders were women who had inherited land and slaves from dead husbands. One planter was a Choctaw chief named Greenwood LeFlore.

Shortly before the Hammonds’ arrival the building’s East Portico had been the scene of an assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson. The assailant was named Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be England’s long-dead King Richard III and claimed that Jackson had interfered with the delivery of payments long owed to him by the colonies. The would-be assassin had two guns, both of which misfired—a good thing because Jackson already had one bullet in his body from an 1806 duel in Tennessee in which he killed his challenger and was himself shot in the chest. After the assassin’s second gun misfired, two men charged to the rescue, one a congressman named Davy Crockett. At the ensuing trial the prosecutor was Francis Scott Key. The assassin was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity.

“No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

Just as Lincoln’s speech lodged the phrase “a house divided” into the American psyche, and Hammond’s speech the “cotton is king” thesis, so Seward’s speech deposited a phrase that would color political discourse for the next three climactic years: “an irrepressible conflict.”

No constitutional right to secession existed, he said. If it did, the Union would be merely “a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States.” But, he noted, states confronted by egregious federal behavior could follow another path. In that case secession would be justified by a higher law of “revolutionary resistance” that superseded even the Constitution. “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution,” he wrote. “It may or it may not be a justifiable revolution, but still it is revolution.”

Observing the festivities, James L. Petigru, the staunch unionist, was said to quip, “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” His mood, however, was somber. “I have seen the last happy day of my life,” he told a friend.

On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. The delegates were very clear about their motivation. “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.”

Construction of the monument had begun in 1848 with enslaved labor but ceased ten years later, just as America’s sectional crisis neared its peak, and would not resume until 1880. Owing to the use of a different marble upon resumption, the tower’s face would forever after have two tones, inadvertently immortalizing in stone America’s antebellum division.

The state courthouse stood on an adjacent corner for the filing of slave mortgages, probate agreements, and other instruments; nearby stood a row of banks and insurers that specialized in financing the trade, including the founding office of a firm even then called Lehman Brothers.

Lincoln veered east to Albany, where a certain well-respected actor was onstage performing in a play called The Apostate. The actor, John Wilkes Booth, threw himself so energetically into his role that at one point he fell on his character’s dagger and carved open a three-inch wound. So well known was Booth as a “tragedian” that the incident made news as far away as Montgomery, Alabama.

General Scott offered Kennedy an aide from his own staff and gave him a choice between two accomplished officers, Col. Charles P. Stone and another colonel named Robert E. Lee. “I don’t know what induced me to select” Stone, Kennedy said later, “but I did so, and told him of my three detectives in the city and their findings.”

A week earlier, facing a minimal threat from a mob of civilians and ragtag militia, the general in charge of U.S. Army forces in Texas, Georgia-born David E. Twiggs, seventy-one years old, had surrendered all federal outposts in the state to the Confederacy, including the fabled Alamo, along with their stockpiles of weapons, in the process cutting adrift twenty-four hundred federal soldiers, or about 15 percent of the existing United States Army. Buchanan fired him for “treachery to the flag of his country.” But Twiggs quickly found another employer: the Confederate States Army, which made him a brigadier general.

A few days later the Peace Convention approved a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to Congress for a vote. All seven of its clauses dealt with slavery, including one nicknamed the “Never-Never” clause, which would bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery as it existed in any state or territory in the country. The seven clauses underscored the fact that for all of the South’s efforts to blame the crisis on Northern tyranny in imposing tariffs, collecting revenue, and ordaining “internal improvements,” the crux of the crisis was in fact slavery. This was obvious to all at the time, if not to members of a certain school of twentieth-century historiography who sought to cast the conflict in the bloodless terms of states’ rights. As famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “I wish that some of our evasive historians, our mufflers of great passionate issues, who are trying to persuade the American public that Negro slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, would read the debates in this Peace Convention.”

Only a few states would ultimately ratify the amendment before events made it irrelevant. Known to future centuries as the Shadow or Ghost Amendment, it remained an active congressionally approved but unratified amendment into the twenty-first century, theoretically still open to a final vote by the states.

The final ending, though heavily influenced by Seward’s changes, was very much Lincoln’s own, laden with reverence and barely suppressed emotion. “I am loth to close,” he wrote. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels in our nature.”

Beauregard directed Smith to buy sixteen “Drummond lights” that burned calcium oxide—quicklime—to produce intense light capable of illuminating harbors at night. This “limelight” was commonly used in theaters to light stages. Beauregard wanted ten lights shipped to New Orleans, six to Charleston.