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.

Anderson walked them to the dock and shook hands with each. “If we never meet in this world again,” he told them, “God grant that we may in the next.”

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.

But here Lincoln revealed his own myopia. What would soon become apparent was how little he understood the South, in particular the existential fear that its planter aristocracy harbored about his becoming president. This was especially the case in South Carolina, a state made desperate by an accumulation of forces both within and beyond its control.

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

What no one appreciated at the time was the extent to which Hammond’s “cotton is king” thesis would blind Southern radicals to the risk that if the South seceded, real war could result, prolonged and ugly. The North would not dare make war, the reasoning went: It could not afford to lose its supply of cotton. And if a war did begin, it would be short—all the South needed to do was shut down cotton production, and the North’s economy would collapse. Nor could the North risk the corollary wrath of Britain, which also depended on Southern cotton and would surely throw its might into the fray on behalf of the seceded states. Cotton was the radicals’ scepter. A simple agricultural product could bring the mighty industrial North to its knees.

And here he deployed a familiar admonition attributed to Jesus in the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ ” “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” He cautioned that he did not expect the Union to dissolve, “but I do expect it will cease to be divided. “It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Though he would lose the election, he gained immediate national prominence. And his use of that “house divided” admonition, attributed to Jesus, would forever stand out as a prescient warning of what was to come.

He then led his audience onto more dangerous ground, deploying the images and language of war. “I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun,” he said. “I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.”

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.”

On November 22, 1860, James Clement Furman, a prominent Baptist minister and first president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, published an open letter that encapsulated the South’s great abiding fear of what would happen if slavery were abolished. “Then every negro in South Carolina and every other Southern State will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you.” Another Southern orator, quoted in the New York Herald, issued an even more vivid warning. “What will you do with these people? Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your States, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be president of the United States?”

“If I had been a man in this great revolution,” she wrote, “—I should have either been killed at once or made a name and done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would be mine—Victory or Westminster Abbey”—meaning a tomb under the floor. She had the ambition that he lacked, and she sought to exercise it through him. It was something of a curse, she acknowledged, not a source of delight and satisfaction. In one diary entry she wailed, “Why was I born so frightfully ambitious?”

Given Buchanan’s antipathy toward turmoil in these last months of his presidency, it is hard to imagine his receiving the Davis crowd with open arms, but as to this, the historical record is silent.

“So completely did our Commander keep his own counsel,” Thompson wrote in a letter to his father back home, “that none in the garrison, officer or soldier, ever dreamed that he contemplated a move, until the movement had actually been made.”

“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.”

at this point in the crisis, the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons. Yet the chivalry, thanks to Edmund Ruffin, James Hammond, and others, had persuaded themselves of a different reality: Slavery was a positive good; it was endorsed by the Bible and by anthropological observation; even two famed Northern anthropologists, Louis Agassiz and Charles Morton, both of Harvard, no less, had proclaimed on the basis of purportedly scientific research that the Black race was not only inferior, but a different species altogether. If slavery was good, then slaveowners were good, and anyone who said otherwise abraded their honor, something no Southerner could forgive.

Browning later would offer Lincoln another telling observation: “The time is not yet, but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.”

Crawford expressed a degree of bitterness, leavened with pride, and made it clear that he had no illusions about the subtext of what was occurring. “We are to be left to ourselves and our own exertions as a sacrifice to turn public opinion against those who attack us, and then if possible save the border states and the Union,” he wrote. “But there is a power behind the throne, the first gun fired at our fort will call the country to arms; the bugle that sounds the attack upon us will echo along the slopes of the Alleghenies, and the granite hills of the North, along the shores of the great lakes, and far away on the rolling prairies of the west and the earth will shake with the tread of armed men.”

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.”

Secretary Seward, for his part, understood that the administration could never recognize the Confederacy, let alone signal that it considered the commissioners to be bona fide representatives of any government entity. If they insisted on a formal answer, he knew, he would have to issue an official declaration turning them down—in effect, denying their existence. And this, he believed, was the surest path to war.

Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.