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

by Erik Larson

We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. —Abraham Lincoln,

I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration. I was appalled by the attack, but also riveted. I realized that the anxiety, anger, and astonishment that I felt would certainly have been experienced in 1860–1861 by vast numbers of Americans.

With this in mind, I set out to try to capture the real suspense of those long-ago months when the country lurched toward catastrophe, propelled by hubris, duplicity, false honor, and an unsatisfiable craving on the part of certain key actors for personal attention and affirmation.

Lincoln’s charming misspellings remain unaltered.

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.

On the stillest nights, at nine o’clock, Major Anderson could hear the great bells in the distant witch-cap spire of St. Michael’s Church, bastion of Charleston society where planters displayed rank by purchasing pews. It stood adjacent to Ryan’s Slave Mart, and each night rang the “negro curfew” to alert the city’s enslaved and free Blacks that they had thirty minutes to return to their quarters, lest the nightly “slave patrol” find them and lock them in the guard house until morning.

Together these planters constituted a kind of aristocracy and saw themselves as such. They called themselves “the chivalry.” As the prominent South Carolina planter James Henry Hammond put it, they were “the nearest to noblemen of any possible in America.”

Not only did the state’s planters call themselves “the chivalry”; they devoured chivalric novels, like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. They held jousting competitions,

“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.”

If anyone cared to look, there was an analogy to be found in a new novel by Charles Dickens, called Great Expectations, just then being published in installments in an English literary weekly. The first installment appeared in December 1860. One of the book’s key characters, Miss Havisham, seemed the perfect embodiment of South Carolina. Having been stood up at the altar, she retired from the world, stopped her clocks, wore her wedding dress forever, and even left her nuptial feast in place, rotting on the table. Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina had retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.

Confederate forces fired on the ships, however, they would in the world’s eyes be the offenders, engaging in an act of dishonor, the very thing the chivalry were schooled from childhood to avoid.

Anderson accepted this without comment. There was no anger, just civility and courtesy. This was, after all, an affair of honor, and there was no more important thing to Anderson and to the Confederate officers than honor. 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.”

In the liturgy of honor, such precision was important: A gentleman was punctual.

The usual society quadrille of house visits and return visits, with calling cards passed inward by Black house servants in white gloves, took on a relentless Rome-afire intensity.

At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”

In a demonstration of humility, he first snipped his own name from the paper ballot, so as not to appear to be voting for himself; he otherwise voted a straight Republican ticket.

Lincoln on a sofa was like a ship’s mast on a barstool, poised in an uneasy equilibrium between relaxation and structural collapse.

He’d won it by twenty-two votes.

An unexpectedly primordial source aided in the city’s sanitation, as observed by one British visitor, John Benwell, author in 1857 of An Englishman’s Travels in America. “As you walk the streets of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal,” he wrote. The birds were protected; anyone caught killing one was subject to a ten-dollar fine. “They appeared to be quite conscious of their privileges, and sailed down from the house-tops into the streets, where they stalked about, hardly caring to move out of the way of the horses and carriages passing.”

The bylaws included a final species-conflating admonition: “The striking of servants and cruelty to animals is expressly forbidden.”

A single “No. 1” man or “Fancy Girl,” as the most-coveted Blacks were often labeled when put up for sale, could have a value in twenty-first-century dollars of nearly fifty-three thousand dollars. Sixty-four of Hammond’s enslaved workers fell into these categories; if they achieved top prices in the marketplace, their value alone could have reached over three million in today’s dollars.

The chivalry did not go door to door begging for votes.

two men charged to the rescue, one a congressman named Davy Crockett. At the ensuing trial the prosecutor was Francis Scott Key.

This unwillingness to engage with colleagues from other states—and their own state’s reputation as a petulant, possibly treasonous force in national politics—gave them an insularity that reinforced the men’s view of themselves as a special presence, a lofty cadre of chivalric gentlemen motivated by honor and higher purpose.

To help defend the institution against potential threats, he opposed all growth in federal power and presence, even “internal improvements” like railroads and canals, no matter how beneficial they might be. He and fellow activists went so far as to oppose funds bequeathed to America by an English philanthropist named Joseph Smithson, whose will directed that the money be used “to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

The city’s white population was a willing audience for a series of lectures given in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard zoologist who claimed that scientific observation proved that Blacks were inferior to whites and thus merited enslavement.

The girls—along with two of their sisters—were soon to occupy a good deal of Hammond’s imagination, with disastrous consequences.

“The Man That Was a Thing”),

Immediately after the book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin emerged, Simms and others responded with a barrage of proslavery, anti-abolitionist novels, well over a dozen, that took the themes of Stowe’s story, notably the separation of enslaved families, and contorted them in ways that verged on the comical. One author, Charles Jacobs Peterson, paradoxically a Philadelphia-bred writer and editor, in that same year published The Cabin and the Parlor, which laid the blame for separation at the feet of financiers in New York, specifically a firm named “Mssrs. Skin and Flint” whose predatory behavior forced a planter to sell his slaves. Another novel, with the cudgel-like title Uncle Robin, in his Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston, blamed slave separations on Northern abolitionists who cajoled slaves into escaping their plantations, thereby leaving them vulnerable to capture and resale by unscrupulous slave traders. The traders were Yankees. Another book, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, carved an especially contorted path, likewise blaming abolitionists for causing slaves to flee, but with the twist that once the fugitives were captured and returned to their plantations, their presence proved so disruptive that the loyal stay-behinds forced their masters to sell them in order to restore harmony.

It had all started, apparently, in 1841 with Hammond’s move to Columbia and the construction of his house. His nieces, the youngest thirteen years old, had reason to come to the house on a regular basis because Hammond’s wife, their aunt Catherine, served as their surrogate mother, stepping into the role after their own mother had died some years earlier. They adored their handsome uncle. Whether the thing was triggered when the girls came over to help him decorate the new house or had some other proximate cause is not at all clear. Hammond, however, soon found himself engaged in sexual dalliance with all four girls. He confessed it later in his diary. “Here were four lovely creatures, from the tender but precious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19 (in 1840–41), each contending for my love, claiming the greater share of it as due to her superior devotion to me, all of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine, encountering warmly every portion of my frame, and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it, in the most secret and sacred regions, and all this for a period of more than two years continuously.” Hammond complained that instead of condemnation, he deserved praise. “Is it in flesh and blood to withstand this?” he wrote in his diary. “Is there a ma...

Hammond felt that in fact it was he who had been wronged, and that if the truth of the whole multiyear affair were ever revealed, he would be exonerated. But that could not happen, he wrote in his diary, and as a result, “the loose manners and ardent temperaments of these lovely and luscious creatures would never be known.”

But now, still smarting from his Senate loss and buffeted by winds of social and political odium—a time when another man might have strived to avoid even the slightest appearance of new impropriety—Hammond revealed another sexual escapade, but of a different sort, one that also arose from his striving for domination of all around him.

Hammond likely acquired Sally because of her overall appearance, for he promptly made her his mistress. In this case there was no question of his sexual interest: He slept with her repeatedly. Their relationship lasted years, and when Sally’s daughter turned twelve in 1850, Hammond made her his mistress as well. Hammond did not address any of this in his diary but eventually disclosed it in a letter to his son Harry in which he revealed that in his will he bequeathed both Sally and Louisa to him, “and all the children of both.” The letter alludes to children sired by both him and Harry and cautioned Harry never to sell Louisa or her offspring. “Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”

Cotton is King.”

In an address that night closing the convention, Lincoln delivered one of his best—and perhaps most foolhardy—speeches, for it may well have cost him the Senate seat. It positioned him as a man unabashedly opposed to slavery, thereby raising concerns that he might be too much of a radical for the Illinois electorate. Upon hearing Lincoln read a draft of it in advance, his law partner, William Herndon, while acknowledging the rightness of its central construct, told him, “It is true, but is it wise or politic to say so?” The speech targeted Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Lincoln denigrated as having reinflamed the conflict over slavery, hitherto quieted by the Missouri Compromise. The new policy, Lincoln told his audience, had been initiated to end the turmoil but instead had managed to increase it. “In my opinion,” he said, “it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed”— 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.”

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.”

He traveled the countryside preaching disunion and took every opportunity to rage at Northern “tyranny,” arguing that the South was even more oppressed by the North than the early colonists had been by the British before the American Revolution.

His zeal prompted one observer to call him “a fiery agent of disunion.” He looked the part: A man of middling height—five feet, eight inches, neither short nor tall—he wore his white hair down to his shoulders; his facial features were sharp and spoke of abstention and judgment, as if he were some biblical character sent to smite the evils of this world—meaning, mainly, Yankees. He loathed the North; like his friend James Hammond, he deemed slavery to be a morally correct and beneficial institution.

Ruffin saw himself as an intellectual but deemed the South a realm that devalued rigorous thought and artistic achievement, and offered little opportunity for interaction with like-minded souls.

“The insanity of the act does not impeach the rectitude of the motive.”

Despite a lack of evidence as to their true attitudes toward slavery, two South Carolina teachers with Northern roots found themselves expelled from the town in which they lived. One newspaper defended the action with the argument that since the teachers were from the North, they were “necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions.” The newspaper provided the emphasis.

Blacks had begun dressing like wealthy white men and women, particularly on Sundays—“negro day”—when the city’s free Blacks supplanted whites in promenading along the Battery. One white visitor, in a letter to his wife, described how “the negro wenches crowd the streets in the height of fashion,” their male counterparts—“the n—r bucks”—doing the same. He found it risible. “All through the week they sweat and bark in the sun with a slouch hat, shirt sleeves rolled up and on Sundays they dress up in fine clothes, wear a silk hat and gloves.” He told his wife it was “enough to make a horse laugh.”

He found Congress seething with sectional malice; it took the House seven weeks to at last elect a speaker.

His friend Edmund Ruffin reveled in the growing national chaos, or more precisely, in the attention it brought him.

At last the South rouses itself to action—Ruffin sets this in 1868—and in short order, six states secede and South Carolina occupies Fort Sumter.

The choice of Lincoln as the Republican nominee surprised Ruffin and disappointed him, because Lincoln seemed too moderate, too respectful of the Constitution’s protections of slavery, to spark the outrage necessary to drive the entire South from the Union, let alone galvanize Ruffin’s torpid home state of Virginia.

John Brown’s raid had caused slaveholders to imagine a vast, organized conspiracy of abolitionists intent on instigating an insurrection. They found proof wherever they chose to look.

Underlying these fears was the deeper dread that newly emancipated Blacks would take their place beside whites at all social levels, or even supplant them, perhaps even marry their daughters, the maximally feared “amalgamation.” That Lincoln himself never actually envisioned or encouraged racial equality, let alone intermarriage, became irrelevant.

Adding to the overall disquiet was a severe drought that settled over the South, from Georgia to Texas, and lasted from July through the following autumn. In Texas it caused the tinderbox conditions that were likely the true culprit in the fires alleged to have been lit by slaves. The cotton harvest fell by over 30 percent, which had the effect of not only reducing planter income but also undercutting the system of credit in which cotton served as the security that allowed planters to expand their holdings. The corn crop was hit especially hard, raising fears of famine. Food prices soared. As the South simmered and Texas prairies grew parched, Southern fears about a world coming to an end became amplified. The approach of Election Day and the seemingly inevitable election of Lincoln seemed to many to threaten apocalypse.

Perhaps no one was more unhappy about Lincoln’s election than the incumbent president, James Buchanan. Above all, Buchanan wanted harmony and resented all this turmoil so near the end of his administration. It was, he said, very unfair—“very hard”—that he likely would not be able to “finish my term of office in peace, at my time of life.”