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

by Erik Larson

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 the “gorge,” this wall was Sumter’s weakest and least-heavily armed; here, too, as at Moultrie, the fort’s designers never anticipated having to defend against an attack from behind by a rebellious state. The kitchens were probably quite dark, since the