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

by Erik Larson

Mudsills Speech,” a watershed moment in the South’s decades-long movement to reassure itself that slavery was indeed a positive good.

Cotton was the radicals’ scepter. A simple agricultural product could bring the mighty industrial North to its knees.

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.”

“Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?” “Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”