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

by Erik Larson

In all, Lincoln had traveled nearly two thousand miles and given over one hundred speeches, all without incident, a remarkable thing given the accumulating rumors of impending violence and the fact that he had traveled with only minimal security—all that way, only to arrive at his new hometown in secret and disguise. It was a mistake, he realized. Just how big a mistake would soon become painfully apparent.

Columnists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line skewered Lincoln, though the secessionist press tended to sneer rather than laugh. “Everybody here is disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry,” reported the Charleston Mercury’s man in Washington. He accused Lincoln of exhibiting “the most wretched cowardice.” The proslavery New York Herald likened Lincoln’s arrival to that of a “thief in the night.”

newly elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis strode into Montgomery for his own inauguration ablaze with war lust, proclaiming that the North must be ready to “smell southern gunpowder and feel southern steel.”

There was a man outside the fort, standing on the esplanade, waving a sword and white flag and asking to come inside.

With Sumter in flames and out of food, its men exhausted, Anderson knew the time had come. He said he would be willing to accept the same terms that Beauregard had proposed two days earlier in his initial

ultimatum: to evacuate the fort, along with all small arms and personal and regimental property, and to salute its flag, and then have the garrison transported to whatever post he wished.

On Monday, April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for “the several States of the Union” to muster their militias and contribute a total of seventy-five thousand troops for the suppression of rebellious “combinations” in the seceded states and to reassert the authority of U.S. law.

Lincoln’s proclamation ordered both houses of Congress to come back into session on July 4 “to consider and determine, such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand.” His choice of date, Independence Day, was hardly an accident; it was meant to call forth those mystic chords of memory to which he had alluded in his inaugural speech. His secretary of war set quotas for the number of troops each state should provide, the largest—seventeen regiments—for New York.

Justice came in circles. Sumter had fallen on April 14, 1861; now, four years later, President Lincoln wanted the American flag to again fly over the fort and

wanted its former commander, Robert Anderson, to raise it. He left the choreography to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had replaced Simon Cameron. Stanton directed that the flag-raising take place during a public ceremony at Sumter—or what was left of it—at noon on April 14, 1865, exactly four years to the day after Anderson and his men had evacuated the fort. They would use the same flag.

Between the day Lincoln issued his order and the date of the planned ceremony, the Civil War had all but come to an end, with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on A...