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

by Erik Larson

Along with board games and cards, the men played leapfrog and, according to Asst. Surgeon Crawford, “ball.” He did not specify what kind, but it was likely a variant of baseball, by then a popular sport that fellow officer Captain Doubleday would often, wrongly, be credited with inventing.

Worse than blackened snow was the prevalence on streets, tavern floors, and hotel carpets of expectorated chewing tobacco. American men seemed determined to mark every standing object with tobacco juice, despite the presence of innumerable spittoons left out for its collection. British visitors invariably found the habit appalling. Before Charles Dickens set out on his 1842 tour of America, he’d heard stories from other travelers about the country’s obsession with chewing tobacco but assumed their accounts were overblown. He found otherwise: “The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone,” he wrote in American Notes, his chronicle of the journey. He found tobacco spoor everywhere. “In all the public places of America this filthy custom is recognized. In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly.” The custom of chewing and spitting tobacco was “inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.” Target spitting appeared to be a particular preoccupation, though one at which few men were adept, judging by the splatters of brown spit that marked the terrain in front of and around spittoons, fireplace hearths, and lamp posts. “I was surprised to observe,” Dickens wrote, “that even steady old chewers of great experience a...

Russell understood, however, that the true cause of the conflict, no matter how hard anyone tried to disguise it, was slavery. He called it a “curse” and likened it to a cancer whose inner damage was masked by the victim’s outward appearance of health. He marveled that the South seemed intent on staking its destiny on ground that the rest of the world had abandoned. “Never,” he wrote, “did a people enter a war so utterly destitute of any reason for waging it.”

Like Seward, Lincoln believed, on basically no evidence, that loyalty to the Union was pervasive, but unlike Seward, he now wanted proof.

To him, it seemed as if they were waiting for events to unfold rather than acting upon “any definite principle designed to control or direct the future.”

A flirtation was a bona fide noun deployed in Southern culture to describe something society found much more palatable, even welcomed, for the distraction it provided.

The administration’s disarray seemed to create an avenue for him to step forward and exercise the power he all along presumed himself to wield.

In the course of the evening’s conversation, Russell heard much about the South’s obsession with honor, including a vehement defense of dueling. “The man who dares tamper with the honor of a white woman knows what he has to expect,” one guest said. “We shoot him down like a dog, and no jury in the South will ever find any man guilty of murder for punishing such a scoundrel.”

The commissioners revealed an intractable belief that Northern men were cowards. As evidence, they cited the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner, a fervent critic of slavery, in the Senate chamber and his refusal to challenge his attacker to a manly duel. Here their argument abandoned logical constraint: As they saw it the violence of the assault was Sumner’s fault, never mind that his assailant, Rep. Preston Brooks, struck first and from behind while Sumner was seated at his Senate desk, as Russell reminded them. The commissioners brushed this aside; Brooks, they said, struck “a slight blow at first and only inflicted the heavier strokes when irritated by the Senator’s cowardly demeanor.”

They were accustomed to mastery and command and proficient in the art of taking offense; they needed the unalloyed respect of all around them.

“The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”

For the moment, at least, this was not war but rather an elaborate if perilous form of sport.

“These women have all a satisfying faith,” Mary wrote. “ ‘God is on our side,’ they cry.” But when Mary and Mrs. Wigfall were alone with their tea, they asked each other why God would be on their side. “We are told, ‘Of course He hates the Yankees.’ ”

Overall he found himself unimpressed. Having witnessed the last charge of the Light Brigade and the siege of Sevastopol, he was perplexed by Sumter’s outsized importance. He wrote later, “A very small affair, indeed, that shelling of Sumter.”

“Oddly enough, the Americans seem to think that a disgrace to their arms becomes diminished by fixing the name of the scene as a sobriquet on one who described it.”

Hammond’s mother-daughter slave lovers, Sally and Louisa, continued to live at Redcliffe, their presence recorded by U.S. Census takers in 1880. By that point Sally and Louisa had been free for fifteen years, and Mrs. Hammond, according to one Hammond expert, had come to accept their presence.