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

by Erik Larson

The boat reached its wharf at twelve forty-five a.m., Friday, April 12, 1861, destined to be the single-most consequential day in American history.

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;

“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.

“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.”

“When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”

“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.”