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

by Erik Larson

As he traveled through Virginia, Ruffin traversed a landscape charged with fear about slave uprisings and suffused with a generalized uneasiness about the future. John Brown’s raid had caused slaveholders to imagine a vast, organized conspiracy of abolitionists intent on instigating an insurrection. They found proof wherever they chose to look. A large fire in Dallas said to have been started by enslaved Blacks sent rumors flying through one train that a large-scale uprising was underway in Texas. Slaves were said to have poisoned food and water supplies, poison being a particularly fearsome thing for planters, given the easy access of house servants to the kitchens of their masters’ homes. In February 1860, South Carolina congressman Laurence M. Keitt, thirty-six years old and an outspoken advocate of secession, learned by telegram that his brother, Dr. W. J. Keitt, a state senator in Marion County, Florida, had been murdered by his own slaves while lying ill in bed, “his throat cut from ear to ear,” according to one news report. Representative Keitt learned later that his brother’s district had been one of the targets marked on John Brown’s maps. Most Southerners did not share Ruffin’s appraisal of Lincoln as being politically moderate. His nomination guaranteed that in the months before Election Day, the South’s anxiety would only increase. It left Representative Keitt virtually unhinged with fear. “If Lincoln is elected—what then?” Keitt wrote in a terror-filled letter...