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

by Erik Larson

The four enslaved men rowing the boat made steady progress despite the wind and chop, and hauled their cargo—three white Confederate officers—with seeming ease. They covered the distance from Charleston to the fortress in about forty-five minutes.

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;

In 1800, Charleston was the fifth-largest city in the United States; by 1860, the twenty-second.

“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.”

Springfield was Lincoln’s hometown. He walked the five blocks from his house to his campaign office, which, thanks to a courtesy by the governor, was located in the Illinois state capitol in a suite ordinarily occupied by the governor himself.

At about three-thirty p.m. Lincoln strolled across the square to cast his own vote as adoring locals called out his various nicknames: Old Abe, Uncle Abe, Honest Abe, Giant Killer.

The messages arrived in code, as was the practice of the day. The operator transcribed them onto small pieces of paper the color of mustard. These were immediately snatched from his hands by others now crowding the room and passed along until eventually they reached Lincoln.

The news was good and kept getting better. He took Chicago by twenty-five hundred votes; Connecticut by ten thousand; Pittsburgh by at least ten thousand. But the big question was New York.

First came a cryptic message from the chair of New York’s Republican Party: “The city of New York will more than meet your expectations.” Lincoln lef...

At last the crucial telegram from New York arrived: “We tender you our congratulations upon...

Telegram after telegram arrived. By midnight the outcome became certain. It was a strange victory: Lincoln won more of the popular vote than any candidate, more in fact than any president had ever won—nearly 1,866,000 votes—but this was only 40 percent of the national total. With the race split four ways, however, it was more than enough. He took the Electoral College by a wide margin.

Even so, the returns offered little hope for bridging the nation’s division. In those few Southern states where he was included on the ballot, he received few votes. In Virginia he won just over 1 percent; in Kentucky, the state of his birth, less than 1 percent. At around two in the morning, Lincoln headed home. He found his wife, Mary, asleep. He touched her shoulder. No response. “I spoke again, a little louder,” he recalled later. “ ‘Mary, Mary! We are elected!’ ”

Shortly before this, however, as he was walking home, a friend heard him say, “Go...

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.

A total of 260 men worked on the forts, with 125 assigned to Sumter, far outnumbering the garrison’s seventy-five officers and privates.

The work of reinforcing the forts would have to proceed quickly, he knew; agitation for secession was intensifying, and Carolina authorities had made no secret of their desire to seize control of all federal property in the harbor.

Hammond’s newly acquired empire included 10,800 acres of land, most of it undeveloped, centered initially on a plantation called Silver Bluff that was said to be named for the gleam emitted when the sun struck deposits of mica in the underlying terrain. His dominion also included one hundred and thirty hogs, ninety-five cattle, twenty-five mules, and twenty sheep, with all but the mules roaming free on the land. The plantation had a sawmill, gristmill, and cotton gin, and a small village of structures that housed the plantation’s greatest asset: its enslaved laborers. In all he now owned one hundred forty-seven, of whom seventy-three were men, seventy-four women. Sixty-four were between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, considered the ideal range. On paper, at least, the age and sex composition promised both a productive workforce and one capable of achieving that desideratum of planters, “natural increase,” meaning a population likely to bear children. Enslaved Blacks were

capital, and a slave family that regularly bore children—a biological compounding of interest—was about as robust an asset as one could dream of. 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.

By the time the last installment appeared, on April 1, 1852, the serialized chapters alone had drawn some fifty thousand readers, many of whom had come to eagerly look forward to Fridays, when each new edition of the National Era would arrive. The complete novel, titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly (in promoting the serial, the newspaper used the subtitle “The Man That Was a Thing”), was published March 20, 1852, and made its forty-year-old author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a literary sensation adored in the North, reviled in the South.

Its central character was noble God-fearing Tom, acquired by a cruel planter named Simon Legree, who beat his enslaved laborers, took female slaves as lovers, and ultimately ordered his overseers to whip Tom to death. The book also depicted the separation of enslaved families and the tragic consequences, as when one Black woman, Cassy, told Tom how, having previously been separated from a son and daughter, she killed her new baby rather than face another separation.

These did little to blunt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In book form, it sold three hundred thousand copies in just the first three months after its publication. In the North, it confirmed readers’ worst imaginings about the true nature of slavery; in the South, it was spurned as yet another Northern failure to understand how slavery benefited the enslaved themselves by providing for all their needs, every day and every night, all year long, regardless of the nation’s overall economic condition.

‘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.”

On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a fierce abolitionist, led a company of twenty-one men in an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia with the intent of arming the region’s enslaved Blacks and sparking a widespread uprising. (The town resides now in West Virginia, which joined the Union as a free state in June of 1863.) Local citizens and militia battled Brown to a standoff until a federal force arrived, led by Col.

Robert E. Lee, for the moment an officer in the U.S. Army. Lee quickly crushed Brown’s insurgency, killing ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons. The effect throughout the South was galvanic. The raid and its leader were the embodiment of the chivalry’s darkest imaginings of slave uprisings. As one historian would later put it, “Not even the fieriest radical could ever have made the threat of an internal holocaust appear so real and imminent to Southerners as had the grim, dedicated Brown.”

Brown’s raid and the turmoil that followed had little lasting effect on the slave trade. By January 1860 prices were soaring.

On Christmas Eve, South Carolina’s secession convention issued a formal “Declaration” to explain to the larger world why the state had decided to exit the Union, composed by delegate Christopher G.

Thomas Jefferson’s famous addition, “that whenever any ‘form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.’ ” The United States, the statement argued, had broken its compact with the slaveholding states, mainly in violating the fourth article of the Constitution, which, without directly mentioning slavery, nonetheless made it clear that slaves were property, and that all escaped slaves had to be returned to their rightful owners. The convention’s declaration also cited the 1778 Articles of Confederation, which asserted that each “State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” the base upon which Southern polemicists had

A prime example of a sea fortress, Sumter was a giant brick pentagon built on an artificial atoll of rock in the middle of Charleston’s shipping channel, surrounded on all sides by water. The nearest land was Morris Island, three-quarters of a mile due south; Charleston’s famous Battery esplanade was three miles to the northwest. The rocks themselves compounded South Carolina’s resentment of the fort: These were Northern rocks, granite from quarries in New York and New England.

Construction began in 1829, but now, thirty years later, the fort was still far from complete. By the time of Anderson’s move, only fifteen guns were mounted, though the fort’s design called for 120 more. Sixty-six giant cannon, unmounted, lay about the interior grounds like beached black whales.

Here, too, were half a dozen temporary wooden structures, used as shops and storehouses, and all manner of rubbish: piles of brick, stone flagging, sand, and high mounds of oyster shells. When burned, the shells produced lime for cement. The fort’s wharf and esplanade, which surrounded its exterior walls, were piled with flagstone, sand, and twenty thousand bricks. The disarray made communication within the fort difficult, though it is likely the garrison’s twenty-five children found ways to use it all profitably.

The officers, at least, could look forward to a fair degree of comfort once the enlisted men’s barracks were completed and all the soldiers and their families moved out of the officers quarters. The building had spacious, airy apartments, each with three floors and thirteen-foot ceilings, the top floor consisting of a single very bright room with windows on both sides but no masonry protection, apparently in the belief that in battle these third-floor aeries could be blown away at no great cost to the efficacy of the fort. The apartments had “water closets”—meaning bathrooms—and multiple fireplaces and large kitchens on the first floor. The water closets drained into the harbor. Tall windows overlooked the interior ground. The opposite walls abutted the exterior wall, or “scarp,” of the fort and were penetrated only by one-foot-wide apertures called loophole windows, three per room, that admitted a narrow shaft of light and a sliver of view. Known in fortress terminology as t...

only exterior light was admitted through three such loopholes. In two apartments the kitchens were even less convivial, given that they shared walls with two large magazines packed with nearly forty thousand pounds of gunpowder. Merciful...

The other four of Sumter’s five sides were designed to house the bulk of its eventual complement of heavy guns. Each wall had three levels. The first was the “casemate” tier, where guns were housed in vaulted, virtually bombproof enclosures and fired through arched openings in the walls, called embrasures.

Guns on the second tier were similarly shielded and also fired through embrasures, but guns on the third tier, the “barbette,” or parapet level, would be positioned out in the open to fire over the tops of the walls. Both the casemate and top tiers were in good shape to receive guns and already held eleven large cannon. The second level, however, was nowhere near complete. It had forty-one openings in its wall, but none had yet been turned into a functional embrasure. Twenty were covered only with boards; the rest were open or haphazardly closed with brick.

The problem here was that these openings could be readily breached by enemy soldiers bearing tall ladders, a battle tactic known since the sixteenth century as “escalade.” Most of the fort’s cannon were thirty-two-pounders, each with a muzzle bore diameter of just over six inches, capable of firing a solid ball weighing—no mystery here—thirty-two pounds. The gun could also fire explosive shells that exited the barrel with a lit fuse; for close-order battle, it fired “canister” and “grape.” A round of canister shot, consisting of a can filled...

“Friends,” Lincoln began. “No one who has never been placed in a like position, can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands. Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man. Here the most sacred ties of earth were assumed; here all my children were born; and here one of them lies buried.” Lincoln would turn fifty-two the next day. The death he referred to was that of his second son, Edward, who had died in 1850 just shy of his fourth birthday, the cause thought to have been tuberculosis.

“To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. To-day I leave you; I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.”

“Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now. To him I commend you all—permit me to ask that with equal security and faith you all will invoke His wisdom and guidance for me.”

By this point, witnesses agree, as rain fell and Lincoln visibly struggled with powerful emotions, a veil of eye-glistening sorrow descended over the crowd. “With these few words,” he said, “I must leave you—for how long I know not. Friends, one and all, I must now bid you an affectionate farewell.”

During one of the many receptions arranged for Lincoln in New York, he met P. T. Barnum, the famed showman, who repeatedly invited him to visit his American Museum. Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, Barnum placed an advertisement on the front page of the New York World inviting New Yorkers to come to the museum and use its windows and balconies to observe Lincoln’s departure from the city. “Remember, this is the last chance in New York,” the ad bellowed. “Come early and get a good place.”

This was Friday, February 22, the last day before Lincoln’s arrival in Washington. After Harrisburg, he was to travel in secret, accompanied only by his putative bodyguard Ward Lamon. The rest of his retinue would follow on the scheduled train and reach Baltimore at midday.

Lincoln put on a worn overcoat and carried a hat of a kind he had never worn before, but which by now had become fashionable in America: a “kossuth” hat made of soft felt, with a low crown, named after Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva, or Louis Kossuth for short, who had been exiled to America in 1851 after Russia invaded Hungary.

Lincoln also carried a shawl, and walked with his shoulders slumped forward to disguise his height.

The plan worked well. Incredibly, no one appeared to recognize Lincoln despite his great height, craggy features, and overall distinctive look. As a precaution the American Telegraph Co. agreed to temporarily sever all telegraph lines from Harrisburg “in all directions,” according to one planner’s account; the company’s superintendent was to dispatch “a professional Climber to do the needful thing in the right place and at the right time.

Lincoln, to further disguise his presence and act the part of an ailing friend, leaned on Pinkerton’s arm and walked with an exaggerated stoop.