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;

Free and enslaved Blacks together accounted for over 40 percent of the population of South Carolina’s chief city, Charleston, and this caused uneasiness among its white citizens. Planters built what were in effect backyard plantations with two or more out-structures housing kitchens, stables, and slave quarters and surrounded by high walls to limit the dangers of insurrection and midnight murder. Any enslaved person who worked outside these walls had to wear a special badge, a metal medallion—square, round, octagonal—stamped “Charleston,” with the year, type of job, and an identification number pinned to clothing or hung around the neck. The

“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.”

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.

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.”

Many Southerners, egged on by activists known as “fire-eaters,” reviled Lincoln as a fanatical abolitionist whom they imagined to be hell-bent on making Blacks and whites equal in all things—an intolerable prospect, despite Lincoln’s repeated vow not to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. So hated was he that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot. The South’s most radical newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, urged that if Lincoln won, every slaveholding state should secede immediately.

The laughter did not last long. Nicolay watched him as the enormity of the moment sank in. He had all but won. “It seemed as if he suddenly bore the whole world upon his shoulders, and could not shake it off.”

To Lincoln all this rancor was a mystery. He could not fathom South Carolina’s reaction. An election had taken place; he had won; America’s greatest democratic tradition had been upheld. 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.

Anderson felt no enmity for the South, per se, though he had little patience for the antics of South Carolina. In a letter from Fort Sumter to an old friend in Washington he wrote, “Like yourself my sympathies are in the matter of the sectional controversy all with the South, but I must confess that I have lost all sympathy with the people who govern this state. They are resolved to cement their secession with blood.”

From the start of his congressional tenure, Hammond proved himself to be an effective partisan in the proslavery movement. 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.”

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.

Lincoln had one more paragraph, startlingly naïve, that he’d wanted Trumbull to include. Two sentences long, and reflecting his persistent belief that pro-Union sentiment would triumph in the South, it proposed that the many Southern militias forming in the slave states were a good thing because they could eventually be put to use in taming rebellion. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South,” Lincoln wanted Trumbull to say. “It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Even the ever-loyal Trumbull balked at this one.

Observing the festivities, James L. Petigru, the staunch unionist, was said to quip, “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” His mood, however, was somber. “I have seen the last happy day of my life,” he told a friend. Nonetheless, Petigru voted for secession. He agreed with a friend’s assessment that the state was “going to the devil,” but in accord with honor and loyalty to home, two of the most powerful forces in the South, he felt compelled to go with it.

Though small, he was also fiery, and in his mind mighty, always willing to express moral certitude. When a fellow Georgian said, “I could swallow him whole and never know the difference,” Stephens shot back, “If you did there would be more brains in your belly than there ever will be in your head!” In his letter to Lincoln, Stephens warned, “When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”

Elsewhere in Washington, Texas senator Wigfall, the fire-eating advocate of rebellion, learned of War Secretary Floyd’s exit and his replacement by Holt; on January 2 he wired the news to Charleston. “Holt succeeds Floyd. It means war.”

On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. 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 pace at which the Union began to disintegrate was breathtaking, and Lincoln had yet to set foot in Washington. — Buchanan did nothing.

The Treason Committee then turned to matters more grave. Under a resolution proposed by Senator Seward of New York (Lincoln’s pick for secretary of state), the committee was directed to investigate a widely rumored threat to the city of Washington by Southern forces hoping to seize the government. The fear of such a coup became pervasive, stoked by wildly inflammatory reports and rumors. A Richmond newspaper came right out and demanded that Maryland and Virginia take steps to block Lincoln’s inauguration. The South-leaning New York Day Book, breathing fire, called upon the South to “save the republic of Washington from the taint of n—rism;—they must expel Lincoln and his free-n—r horde from the federal district.”

Seward’s wife, also displeased, was more direct in her criticism. “My dearest Henry,” she wrote. “Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who love you best.” His friends, she wrote, would have preferred “that you had not spoken at all.” She found the speech morally offensive and had no reservations about telling him so. “Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the Liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right—The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a Law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive—giving half of the Frontier of a free Country to the curse of Slavery—these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.”

The foremost of these was the Jockey Club Ball, the most glamorous social gathering of the entire year, held in Charleston’s St. Andrews Hall, the same venue where delegates to South Carolina’s secession convention had voted the state out of the Union. The ball began at eleven p.m. and ended at six the next morning with dancing and an elaborate banquet; it drew only the “very select,” according to one attendee, “none but the higher classes.” Single men and women alike found it a worthy place to meet potential future spouses, though one visiting British author, Margaret Hunter Hall, found the event less than stellar. 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.”

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,”

“They saw a tall, powerful man whose grand face overlooked them all; whose voice was kindly, who greeted every one with dignity and a courteous propriety of expression which surprised his friends,” wrote Vermont delegate Lucius E. Chittenden, the official keeper of Peace Convention records. Now and then a delegate would ask Lincoln a pointed question tinged with “a slight contemptuous disrespect,” Chittenden recalled. “Then his stature seemed to grow loftier, and there was a ring to his voice and flash from his eyes which discouraged a repetition of the experiment.”

Upon being introduced to Rives, Lincoln told him, “You are a smaller man than I supposed.”

At the Capitol, before the inauguration ceremony began, Buchanan took Lincoln aside. Private secretary John Hay watched. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weather-beaten head. Every word must have its value at such an instant. Buchanan said: ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the White House better than that of the left.’ ”

Early on the morning of Friday, March 8, Confederate guns began firing from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, and from Cummings Point on Morris. This in itself was not unusual. The Confederate gunners were constantly firing off blank charges for no apparent purpose other than practice or perhaps to intimidate the men at Sumter. During Friday’s demonstration the first three shots were indeed blanks, fired from Moultrie, followed by two more blank discharges from Cummings Point. A third shot from Cummings Point was a surprise.

It was immediately obvious that the Confederates manning those guns were even more astonished than the men at Sumter. And terrified. The chivalry bolted, red sashes flying, sabers clanking, as they tried to get as far away from their own guns as possible, as quickly as possible,

The shot was so clearly an accident that Anderson withheld fire. “The Major laughed, the officers laughed, everybody laughed,” wrote Crawford, “and instead of taking to bombs we took to breakfast.”

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.

Despite being far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the city was an island of pro-South sentiment. Its banks, merchants, and shipping companies maintained close commercial ties with Southern planters and routinely issued credit secured by the planters’ holdings of enslaved Blacks. At a dinner hosted by a city banker, Russell heard the persistent view that the federal government had no authority to suppress secession; a former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, unabashedly declared that secession was a right. The proslavery New York Herald openly mocked Lincoln, Russell noted in his diary. “The Herald keeps up the courage and spirit of its Southern friends by giving the most florid accounts of their prospects and making continual attacks on Mr. Lincoln and his Government.”

Then on Sunday morning, something unexpected: Manning revealed that he had told his own wife about the flirtation. “And now,” Mary wrote, “Mrs. M writes for Mr C’s likeness as she wants to begin a flirtation with him.”

As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”

As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously. The Confederacy had reduced and seized one of the most powerful forts in the land, the symbol of Northern tyranny, as three of the Union’s warships stood

That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand.

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.

For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, “If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

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.”

Two months later, in Washington, Lincoln would tell an aide, “Of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”