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

by Erik Larson

By this he was referring to the Dred Scott decision, which would be issued just two days after his inauguration by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, seventy-nine, who loved the South and feared for the survival of Southern civilization. In his decision, Taney ruled that Blacks could not be citizens, that slaves were property that could be moved at will, and, further, that Congress could not bar slavery from any territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had already repealed the Missouri Compromise, but Taney’s ruling went a step further and declared that it had been unconstitutional in the first place.

“I tremble for our country,” she wrote. “I hope foreigners will not judge us by our head. I hope he will keep the peace but I am afraid that our union has commenced to break and will soon fall to pieces but God knows what is best and we can leave all in his hands.”

In certain circles, dark talk held that Lincoln would never make it to Inauguration Day. For the slaveholding states, his election conjured the real possibility of abolition and its inevitable—and intolerable—consequence, the utter loss of control over the Black race. 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.”

She had the ambition that he lacked, and she sought to exercise it through him.

But he did harbor the concern that once having exited the Union, the Southern states might descend into a political free-for-all dominated by radicals—“the little great men”—seeking only power and personal gratification.

The governor and his family were such ardent believers in the Southern cause that Gist’s brother’s given name was States Rights Gist.

Newspapers called him “Aunt Fancy.” For years when he was in Washington he roomed with a fellow senator, William R. King of Alabama, himself an accomplished politician. The pair was so close both in public and in private that newspapers described them as a married couple, with Buchanan the husband, Senator King his wife. The death of King in 1853 left Buchanan bereft and alone.

“The people in the South are mad; the people in the North asleep,” Cass said. “The president is pale with fear.”

“South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.”

“we are going to have a glorious monarchy.”

At length the party decided to follow Varina and go to the White House. Porter did not join them. “This fraternizing with rebels by the President of the United States struck me at the time as very singular,” he wrote. “I could not understand how a man who had sworn to uphold the Constitution, and maintain the laws of the country could, at such a time as that, be receiving the felicitations of a rebel cause…yet

By now the war secretary had become a deeply controversial figure and an embarrassment to President Buchanan, which was saying something, since the administration itself was widely considered to be an embarrassment. Floyd was deemed by many to be a paragon of corruption, and a traitor to boot.

Loyal citizens in Pittsburgh protested and stopped the transfers.

He likened South Carolina to “an old woman who has been engaged in scolding all her life until at last she works herself up into a fit of hysterics and thus has all kinds of fantasies and imaginations…and like a wild cat is ready to fly at any person who looks at her.”

Although telegraphic communication was efficient, the messages carried were themselves often unreliable, with a patina of false credibility conferred by the technical novelty of the medium.

Buchanan told Toombs he had not yet decided how to proceed with regard to Sumter. “The Cabinet is now in session upon that very subject.” “I thank you Sir for the information that is all I wanted to know,” Toombs said, and prepared to exit. “But Mr. Toombs, why do you ask?” “Because Sir my State has a deep interest in the decision.” This perplexed Buchanan. “How your state—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbor is abandoned?” “Sir,” Toombs answered, “the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.” “Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?”

“Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”

Their honor bruised, their hubris abruptly deflated, the commissioners composed a peevish note to the president. In prose that dripped presumption, they told Buchanan that they had initially planned to negotiate “with the earnest desire to avoid all unnecessary and hostile collision, and so to inaugurate our new relations as to secure mutual respect, general advantage, and a future of good will and harmony, beneficial to all the parties concerned. But the events of the last twenty-four hours render such an assurance impossible.”

It was now clear to the commissioners that there would be no meeting with Buchanan. The next day, New Year’s Day 1861, the commissioners launched their final retort, laced with frustration and hurt feelings. These men were, after all, the most upstanding of the South Carolina chivalry, accustomed to having their way with slaves and yeomen alike.

“I would willingly take out of my life a period in years equal to the two months which intervene between now and my inauguration to take the oath of office now,” he told a friend in a moment of unusual despond. In those two months, anything could happen. “Because every hour adds to the difficulties I am called upon to meet, and the present Administration does nothing to check the tendency toward dissolution, I, who have been called to meet this awful responsibility, am compelled to remain here, doing nothing to avert it or lessen its force when it comes to me.” Citing scripture, he told his friend, “My cup of bitterness is full and overflowing.”

in his mind mighty, always willing to express moral certitude.

The old general with reassuring élan had promised that if any secessionist forces “show their faces or raise a finger I’ll blow them to hell.”

“It seems to me the inauguration is not the most dangerous point for us. Our adversaries have us more clearly at disadvantage, on the second Wednesday of February, when the votes should be officially counted.”

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.”

The most mundane procedural act could unleash cataracts of words in hours-long speeches, as senators and representatives sought fresh opportunities to irritate one another by picking at old issues that had inflamed debate for months. Verbal scuffles were routine, with otherwise sober and dignified members of Congress flinging petty procedural motions at one another like handfuls of gravel.

All this mollycoddling infuriated at least one prominent Charlestonian, however. Fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett grew so frustrated that he strode into Governor Pickens’s office and demanded that he immediately authorize the taking of Sumter. Pickens and Rhett detested each other, but the governor reacted with forbearance and wit. “Certainly, Mr. Rhett; I have no objection!” Pickens replied. “I will furnish you with some men, and you can storm the work yourself.” “But, sir, I am not a military man!” “Nor I either,” Pickens said, “and therefore I take the advice of those that are!”

General Scott’s troops and cannon were visible throughout the city, a potent symbol of the Army’s resolve to ensure that the electoral count and certification of Lincoln’s election, set for February 13, would occur without disruption. One of the most common rumors held that the biggest threat came from Baltimore, where six thousand men were reputed to be armed and prepared to act. As the date of the count neared, one hundred police officers from New York and Philadelphia converged on Washington to further ensure its successful completion.

The delegates were, to put it kindly, an august group, though Horace Greeley was not inclined to kindness when he dubbed it an “Old Gentlemen’s Convention” whose attendees were “political fossils, who would not have been again disinterred” if not for the crisis at hand. Greeley’s nickname stuck. One elderly delegate died during the conference. The attendees resolved early on to keep all proceedings secret from the public to avoid the likelihood that conferees would play to the press with overlong speeches and inflammatory remarks. The speeches occurred anyway, day in day out, in a ceaseless grind of words having all the verve of a glacier.

He proposed to acquire the fort through a simple legal maneuver used routinely in domestic civic life and then to pay for it “to the full extent of the money value of the property,” as if it were simply a house in the path of a planned railroad.

“You think our system an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last,” Hammond wrote. “We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects. “Can you not let us alone?”

Governor Pickens had a further incentive for not attacking Fort Sumter just yet. This was Race Week in Charleston, the city’s premier social event.

Many of the South’s leading lights were away, plotting rebellion. But the planters who did attend brought with them wives and eligible sons and daughters. They brought retinues of Black servants and between races sold or acquired others. The jockeys were enslaved; the trainers were enslaved. White planters relied on slaves to maximize the value of their horses and in the process burnish their own social cachet. In this milieu a horse was much more than just a horse. As the South Carolina Jockey Club’s biographer put it in 1857, horses were “the impersonation of Carolina chivalry—the embodied spirit of Carolina blood and Carolina honor.” The planters were knights engaged in chivalric contests. Winning mattered. Observing the effect of a loss on the backers of one racehorse, a Carolina writer noted in 1859 how it made these “manly men” feel restless and dissatisfied. “Their cavalier blood is stirred—they cannot brook such defeat—they cannot go home thus shorn, stripped of their trophies, bankrupt of applause—not a green leaf of all their laurels, now only a crown of thorns.”

The gentlemen were “very second-rate,” she wrote in her book, The Aristocratic Journey. As for the women: “I never in my life saw so many ugly women gathered together.”

That day crowds of irate Southerners had gathered in Washington and converged on the Capitol clamoring to get inside. General Scott, however, was well prepared. Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started. The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.” Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.” Concern about the count was real and had intensified as the day approached. The fact was, the electoral votes were vulnerable. These were paper certificates that had to be transported from the Senate to the House, where Vice President Breckinridge would certify the count and announce the result. “This was the critical day for the peace of the capital,” wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong. “A foray of Virginia gents…could have done infinite mischief by destroying the legal evidence of Lincoln’s election.” Rep. Charles Francis Adams mad...

“Americans, all, we are not enemies, but friends—We have sacred ties of affection which, though strained by passions, let us hope can never be broken.”

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.

Cartoonists, blessing the day, added a kilt; one depicted Lincoln with the now requisite Scotch cap peering from a freight car in wide-eyed terror at a cat in full hiss.

All this underscored an inescapable truth, that at a time when Lincoln needed to appear as commanding as possible, he had slipped quietly into the capital of the country he was now expected to lead.

When Chicago’s mayor publicly accused Pinkerton of concocting a hoax, the two wound up battling it out with their fists on the street.

each side increasingly convinced of its own virtue,

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.”

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.

Varina had little choice in the matter. Theirs was a marriage rife with subterranean tension. Davis was a creature of the planter aristocracy, patriarchal in the extreme, a trait made even more pronounced by the nearly two-decade difference in their ages. They had married in 1845, when she was eighteen years old and he thirty-seven. She caught a glimpse of this aspect of him during their courtship. “He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man,” she told her mother, “but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me.”

On their honeymoon, Davis took Varina to see his dead wife’s grave.

“Winnie is Husband’s baby and baby is your devoted Wife.” She called him “Uncle Jeff.”

“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.”

From Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, however, came renewed confidence that time would heal all, with the Vermilion County Press projecting that “secession will play itself out in less than six months if left to itself.” In a breezy aside the paper added: “There may be some bloodshed but it will not be much.”

What he was recommending was an invading force larger than the entire U.S. Army as then constituted.

“South Carolina slave holder as I am my very soul sickened,” she wrote. “It is too dreadful. I tried to reason—this is not worse than the willing sale most women make of themselves in marriage—nor can the consequences be worse. The Bible authorizes marriage and slavery—poor women! poor slaves!”

He found it strange, and demoralizing.