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

by Erik Larson

Anderson complained, too, that South Carolina authorities had detained the fort’s only hired servant, a free Black named Thomas Moore Lynch, after he had ventured into Charleston bearing a permit signed by the U.S. secretary of war. The boy’s return, Anderson told Pickens, “was undoubtedly called for in this case by common civility and courtesy, as the officers have no opportunity of replacing him.” Civility and courtesy thus invoked, the incident now became a matter of honor. David Jamison, South Carolina’s secretary of war, replied on the governor’s behalf and told Anderson that in fact Thomas Lynch was a slave, and that it was “the unquestionable privilege of a slave owner to permit or not, at his own pleasure, the return of his slave to a hostile fort.” But there was more to the story, Jamison wrote. Charleston police had discovered that Lynch was carrying on “a very improper correspondence” with his mother. They found a letter in his possession in which the boy told her that if a battle broke out in Charleston between Sumter’s men and the state, “the negroes would rise” and assist the federal forces. This of course raised the specter of the kind of insurrection slaveholders had always feared. Moreover, Jamison wrote, the police investigation had turned up letters written by Lynch’s mother in which she described “operations in this city which were not proper to be communicated to anyone in your garrison.” But now Jamison managed, perhaps unknowingly, to impugn Anderson...