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

by Erik Larson

Slavery with us is no abstraction—but a great and vital fact. Without it our every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, made unhappy—education, the light of knowledge—all all lost and our people ruined for ever. Nothing short of separation from the Union can save us. —Arthur Peronneau Hayne to President James Buchanan, December 22, 1860

The boat reached its wharf at twelve forty-five a.m., Friday, April 12, 1861, destined to be the single-most consequential day in American history.

On the stillest nights, at nine o’clock, Major Anderson could hear the great bells in the distant witch-cap spire of St. Michael’s Church, bastion of Charleston society where planters displayed rank by purchasing pews. It stood adjacent to Ryan’s Slave Mart, and each night rang the “negro curfew” to alert the city’s enslaved and free Blacks that they had thirty minutes to return to their quarters, lest the nightly “slave patrol” find them and lock them in the guard house until morning. Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading now thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 U.S. Census listed 440 South Carolina planters who each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district, this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10.2. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves. One South Carolina family, the descendants of Nathaniel Heyward, owned over three thousand, of whom 2,590 resided within the state.

The 1860 census found that the state had 111,000 more enslaved people than it did whites; it was, moreover, one of only two states where this kind of imbalance existed, the other being Mississippi. Free and enslaved Blacks together accounted for over 40 percent of the population of South Carolina’s chief city, Charleston,

Planters had once constituted the richest class in America, wrote Dennis Hart Mahan, a New York–born, Virginia-raised professor at West Point in a November 1860 letter to a friend. “But when commerce, manufacturers, the mechanic arts disturbed this condition of things, and amassed wealth that could pretend to more lavish luxury than planting, then came in, I fear, this demon of unrest which has been the utmost sole disturber of the land for years past.”

Jilted at the altar of the Railroad Age, South Carolina had retreated into its own world of indolence and myth.

At one point during the day Lincoln said that elections in America were like “ ‘big boils’—they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.”

A cataclysmic change: If Lincoln won and the Republican Party took control in Washington, it would sweep out the administration of James Buchanan and the proslavery Democratic Party, which had filled most federal posts with men sympathetic to the South and its “peculiar institution.”

The prospect of party change was by itself daunting for the slaveholding South, but the ascent of Lincoln made it terrifying. Many Southerners, egged on by activists known as “fire-eaters,” reviled Lincoln as a fanatical abolitionist whom they imagined to be hell-bent on making Blacks and whites equal in all things—an intolerable prospect, despite Lincoln’s repeated vow not to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. So hated was he that ten Deep South states did not even include him on the ballot. The South’s most radical newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, urged that if Lincoln won, every slaveholding state should secede immediately.

For many in the South the election was the crucible event. A Lincoln victory, wrote fire-eater Edmund Ruffin in his diary, “will serve to show whether these Southern States are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved—whether the institution of negro slavery on which the social and political existence of the South rests, is to be secured by our resistance, or to be abolished in a short time.” Ruffin dearly hoped—“most earnestly and anxiously desired”—that Lincoln would win, “because I have hope that at least one state S.C. will secede, and that others will follow.” If the South did not resist, he wrote, “there never will be future maintenance of our rights—and the end of negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions and our fate.”

the South did not like the outcome. For one thing, Lincoln’s election and the apprehension leading up to it inflicted a direct cost on the financial well-being of the South’s leading citizens, its planters. Cotton prices fell, as did the market value of slaves, and this in turn limited the planters’ ability to use them as security for mortgages and other investments. An “Extra No. 1” male who sold for $1,625 in Richmond over the preceding summer now sold for only $1,000, or 38.5 percent less. South Carolina reacted with particular fury. The day after the election, the state’s most senior federal officials resigned their posts, among them federal judge Andrew Gordon Magrath. “In the political history of the United States, an event has happened of ominous import to fifteen slaveholding States,” Magrath said upon resigning; he vowed that henceforth he would obey only the wishes of his own state. “So far as I am concerned,” he said, “the Temple of Justice, raised under the Constitution of the United States, is now closed.” Better that, he declared, than to have it “desecrated with sacrifices to tyranny.” Magrath’s act electrified the South.

At no time had he threatened to abolish slavery or emancipate the millions of enslaved men and women who populated the plantations of the South. But fire-eaters and secessionist editors had portrayed him as seeking exactly that.

For many visitors, however, there was also an undercurrent of brutality they found hard to abide. Enslaved Blacks transported from the upper South in the extremely lucrative domestic trade arrived by ship and train, but also on foot in “coffles,” groups of captive men, women, and children often tethered together with chains and iron collars. The city had thirty-two slave brokerages, which held frequent auctions. One traveler who out of curiosity paused to witness an auction found himself deeply repulsed. “The scene was most painful, humiliating, and degrading,” he wrote. “I became quite affected myself, and was obliged to hurry away, for fear of showing what I felt.” Out of concern for alienating visitors, the city had banned outdoor sales between 1839 and 1849, but then, in accord with the rise of the so-called proslavery movement, reinstated them. After all, if slavery was good, why be ashamed? But Charleston banned them again in 1856 because of increasingly vicious coverage in northern newspapers and abolitionist journals. On the day the ban took effect, an enterprising trader, Thomas Ryan, sensing opportunity, opened his Ryan & Sons Mart on Chalmers Street a few blocks from the waterfront, complete with a four-story “barracoon,” a prison for holding captive Blacks until the day of sale. Locals called it “Ryan’s n—r jail.” It had a kitchen and, ominously, a morgue. In the big indoor showroom that fronted Chalmers, the enslaved climbed onto a platform three feet off the ...

Anderson felt no enmity for the South, per se, though he had little patience for the antics of South Carolina. In a letter from Fort Sumter to an old friend in Washington he wrote, “Like yourself my sympathies are in the matter of the sectional controversy all with the South, but I must confess that I have lost all sympathy with the people who govern this state. They are resolved to cement their secession with blood.” Having grown up in Kentucky, Anderson understood the South and its passions and resentments in a way that the new president, Abraham Lincoln, appeared not to. Slavery was central to that life. Anderson, who was still given to describing enslaved Blacks as “darkies,” embraced the proslavery ethos that slavery was in fact a positive good, both for the slaves and for society as a whole. He accepted without challenge the often espoused argument that the Bible expressly permitted slavery.

Doubleday believed that in supporting slavery, Anderson—like many in the South—had fallen out of step with the great global shift that had driven the North and the advanced societies of Europe to reclassify it as a wholly repulsive moral wrong. “He could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction,” Doubleday wrote. Anderson saw himself “more like an arbiter between two contending nations than a simple soldier engaged in carrying out the instructions of his superiors.”

The students developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to abrasions of honor, and with it a corollary penchant, and reputation, for violence. This became acutely evident on February 18, 1856, with the “Guard House Riot,” when, according to one account, “more than one hundred enraged young men, with rifles in their hands”—all enrolled in the college—confronted the city’s militia, this after one student struck the city’s chief of police and the chief struck back with his club. The confrontation was calmed by the intercession of a well-liked former college president. A separate event had a less salubrious outcome. In the dining hall two students reached for a plate of fish at the same time, causing the slower of the two to feel affronted. He issued a challenge. The ensuing duel killed both.

More importantly, it gave them the connections to help them on their way toward success in the two realms that mattered most to the white aristocracy—politics and planting, with achievement in the latter counted in the number of enslaved people you owned and the array of fine possessions displayed in your home. If a student had any qualms about slavery, he found them eased at every turn, particularly in his senior year, when graduating students attended lectures in “moral philosophy” that taught them “to delight in the possession and exercise of power,” affirmed the rightness of the existing social hierarchy, and reinforced that it was “absolutely necessary to keep the blacks in the present condition.” Not surprisingly, the school’s budget for 1845 included nine hundred dollars for the “Purchase of Jack, (a slave).”

He gave up teaching to study law and eventually built a successful practice. He allied himself with a new legion of political radicals devoted to asserting the state’s right to nullify federal laws that it determined to be unconstitutional. His advocacy of nullification, or what its proponents liked to call “states’ rights,” drew him into the orbit of South Carolina’s most powerful politician, John C. Calhoun, then vice president of the United States.

Enslaved Blacks were capital, and a slave family that regularly bore children—a biological compounding of interest—was about as robust an asset as one could dream of. A single “No. 1” man or “Fancy Girl,” as the most-coveted Blacks were often labeled when put up for sale, could have a value in twenty-first-century dollars of nearly fifty-three thousand dollars. Sixty-four of Hammond’s enslaved workers fell into these categories; if they achieved top prices in the marketplace, their value alone could have reached over three million in today’s dollars.

Hammond conflated human lives with other plantation assets. “Every thing dies,” he wrote, “not only people, but mules, horses, cattle, hogs—life seems here to be the mere sport of some capricious destiny. Whether it is a judgement on me or on the place I know not.” Hammond pursued a strategy of absolute dominance. He allowed his enslaved Blacks to visit town only twice a year; he determined who would be allowed to marry, who to divorce. He selected the names of babies, changing them at will, sometimes assigning a name to honor a guest in his house. When Josiah Nott, a racist physician and influential proslavery writer, came for a visit, Hammond named a newly arrived Black infant “Nott.” To encourage marriage and the births that he hoped would follow, he offered a five-dollar bonus to newlyweds. For second marriages, apparently less valuable, he paid only three dollars and fifty cents. Divorce earned one hundred lashes. To Hammond, as to other planters, whipping was an important element of control to remind the enslaved of their place in the plantation hierarchy. Planters preferred the more genteel term, “correcting.” So routine was this on Hammond’s Silver Bluff plantation that he included precise instructions in a manual he wrote for his overseers, the men who directed his enslaved workers on a daily basis. “The highest punishment,” he wrote, “must not exceed 100 lashes in one day and to that extent only in extreme cases.” The lash itself was to be one inch wide. “In gene...

They brought with them their own homegrown proclivity toward clubbiness and the hauteur instilled in them by their lives back home as masters of their personal slave empires. Even the White House, the hub of Washington social life, was beneath them, occupied as it was by Jackson, the benighted Democrat who forcefully crushed Carolina’s nullification movement. They made a point of declining invitations to the elaborate parties Jackson threw on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. This unwillingness to engage with colleagues from other states—and their own state’s reputation as a petulant, possibly treasonous force in national politics—gave them an insularity that reinforced the men’s view of themselves as a special presence, a lofty cadre of chivalric gentlemen motivated by honor and higher purpose.

From the start of his congressional tenure, Hammond proved himself to be an effective partisan in the proslavery movement. To help defend the institution against potential threats, he opposed all growth in federal power and presence, even “internal improvements” like railroads and canals, no matter how beneficial they might be. He and fellow activists went so far as to oppose funds bequeathed to America by an English philanthropist named Joseph Smithson, whose will directed that the money be used “to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” What most troubled Hammond and his fellow Southerners was the rapid intensification of antislavery sentiment in the North, epitomized in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison’s founding in Boston of his abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Antislavery societies soon proliferated and began bombarding the South with pamphlets and broadsides that depicted slavery as an unalloyed evil. Many Virginians blamed Garrison’s rhetoric for igniting the Nat Turner Rebellion of August 21–22, 1831, in which Turner and coconspirators killed fifty-five whites. In the days after Virginia’s suppression of the revolt, three dozen Blacks were murdered on mere suspicion that they had taken part; another nineteen were executed after standing trial. In July 1835 Charleston reacted with outrage as news spread that the city’s postmaster had discovered a large shipment o...

Free Blacks especially came under suspicion, with the memory of a barely averted slave insurrection in 1822, planned by a free Black Charlestonian, Denmark Vesey, still fresh in the community psyche.

If slavery was good, so too were the slaveholders: To attack slavery as an evil was to soil the honor of the owners themselves, the chivalry. If this abolitionist assault on Southern honor did not subside, he warned, the consequences would be grave. “We may have to adopt an entire non-intercourse with the free States, and finally, Sir, we may have to dissolve this Union.”

According to the 1850 U.S. Census it had a total population of 6,060, of whom 3,184 were white and 2,680 enslaved Blacks; another 196 were free Blacks, leaving the city almost equally divided between races. To address this discomfiting ratio, the city established various mechanisms for racial control. One civic official was an overseer of carts, streets, and “negroes,” all of whom, whether enslaved or not, had a nighttime curfew just like their peers in Charleston, signaled by a bell that in winter sounded at nine p.m., in summer, nine forty-five. No more than five Blacks were permitted to assemble at a time unless a white person was present to supervise them. The city’s white population was a willing audience for a series of lectures given in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard zoologist who claimed that scientific observation proved that Blacks were inferior to whites and thus merited enslavement.

ambition. From the press and the public at large, Hammond received plaudits for his performance as governor and exhortations to run for the U.S. Senate. Hammond’s confidence grew. He cast himself as the torchbearer for slavery, in part because this of all things seemed to draw him acclaim. In 1845 he began writing what would become two long “letters”—essays really—in defense of slavery, addressed to Thomas Clarkson of England, “the Patriarch of Abolition,” as Hammond called him. Clarkson, then eighty-four, had led the campaign that resulted in Britain, in 1807, ending its involvement in the international slave trade, and triggered what by mid-century had become a worldwide drive toward abolition. Hammond’s “Letters” were published by the Columbia South-Carolinian “and have produced quite a sensation,” Hammond noted in his diary. “I have received many extravagant compliments.” By 1846 Hammond was widely considered a contender for the Senate. To stop him, Wade Hampton took the scandal public; he circulated to state legislators a document full of details. In Carolina’s honor-bound culture this was a risky thing to do. Hampton himself came in for significant criticism for airing so private a matter in the legislature and thereby publicly tarnishing the reputations of his own daughters, but he succeeded in hobbling Hammond’s candidacy. Hammond lost by a vote of 97 to 46.

There were two enslaved women in which Hammond took a particular interest. In January 1839 Hammond purchased an eighteen-year-old named Sally Johnson and her one-year-old daughter, Louisa, for nine hundred dollars with the idea that Sally would serve as one of his “house slaves.” These positions were typically assigned to Blacks who for one reason or another were deemed attractive: good looks, good teeth, good diction, or light skin. In Charleston’s thirty-two slave brokerages, Sally would likely have been graded a “Fancy Girl.” While many such women were, like Sally, selected for duties in the “big house,” others were hired out for purposes of prostitution, with their owners pocketing the income. Hammond likely acquired Sally because of her overall appearance, for he promptly made her his mistress. In this case there was no question of his sexual interest: He slept with her repeatedly. Their relationship lasted years, and when Sally’s daughter turned twelve in 1850, Hammond made her his mistress as well. Hammond did not address any of this in his diary but eventually disclosed it in a letter to his son Harry in which he revealed that in his will he bequeathed both Sally and Louisa to him, “and all the children of both.” The letter alludes to children sired by both him and Harry and cautioned Harry never to sell Louisa or her offspring. “Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly...

Hammond entered the Senate as the nation writhed through yet another conflict over slavery. In May 1854, Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois had won passage of what became known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established two new territories and allowed the inhabitants of each to decide whether to permit slavery, a doctrine known as popular sovereignty. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in all new territory north of the 36º30' parallel. The act set off a race between slaveholders and free-soil advocates to populate the new territories in order to influence the choice. In Kansas, that race soon led to open warfare between factions and gave rise to the term “Bleeding Kansas.” Opponents of the bill founded a new party committed to halting the expansion of slavery and eventually settled on the name Republican. Southerners dubbed its leaders “Black Republicans.”

What’s more, slavery assured that the white male populace would be free to fight without disrupting the economy. “At any time, the South can raise, equip, and maintain in the field, a larger army than any Power of the earth can send against her, and an army of soldiers—men brought up on horseback, with guns in their hands.” But the most potent weapon, he proclaimed, was the South’s control of cotton. “Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, when they make war on us we can bring the whole world to our feet.” The South could simply stop producing this vital crop, he warned. “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: old England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her.” And here he waved a scimitar of words that would bring him lasting fame: “No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

“Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to herself, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for the purpose, and call them slaves.”

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.”

The effect throughout the South was galvanic. The raid and its leader were the embodiment of the chivalry’s darkest imaginings of slave uprisings. As one historian would later put it, “Not even the fieriest radical could ever have made the threat of an internal holocaust appear so real and imminent to Southerners as had the grim, dedicated Brown.”

In the South, there was only rage and fear. Existing state militias saw a surge in new recruits; new companies formed as well and began actively drilling their volunteers. Stockpiles of arms expanded. Communities formed vigilance committees to identify and eject citizens who might be harboring abolitionist views. An Atlanta newspaper warned, “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South who does not boldly declare that he or she believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.”

Charleston seemed particularly inflamed. Announcements in two city newspapers called for the interrogation of every male citizen to “learn whether he is for us or against us in the conflict now waged by the North against our property and our rights.” Outsiders and free Blacks in particular merited close interrogation. Scrutiny became aggressive. Despite a lack of evidence as to their true attitudes toward slavery, two South Carolina teachers with Northern roots found themselves expelled from the town in which they lived. One newspaper defended the action with the argument that since the teachers were from the North, they were “necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions.” The newspaper provided the emphasis.

In Charleston, Brown’s raid also produced a general awakening to the “demoralization” of enslaved Blacks. This did not mean the city suddenly began to worry about slave morale; rather, that Blacks had been given too much opportunity to consort among themselves in their own churches, schools, and communal residences and were showing far too much independence. The city, it seemed, had allowed its vigilance to wane. Some Blacks even had the nerve to subscribe to the antislavery New York Tribune. One domain where the city’s watchfulness had slipped was that of fashion, a particularly obvious marker of newfound pride. Blacks had begun dressing like wealthy white men and women, particularly on Sundays—“negro day”—when the city’s free Blacks supplanted whites in promenading along the Battery. One white visitor, in a letter to his wife, described how “the negro wenches crowd the streets in the height of fashion,” their male counterparts—“the n—r bucks”—doing the same. He found it risible. “All through the week they swe...

One act required traveling salesmen to get a license. To apply, they needed two letters from South Carolinians attesting to their bona fides, had to post a three-thousand-dollar bond, and were required to swear that they would not interfere with or infringe any laws or regulations “made for the government of slaves and free persons of color.”

The state’s then governor, William Gist, saw Brown’s raid as the logical culmination of the North’s growing antislavery agitation. The North, he said, had “crossed the Rubicon.” Alarm grew when evidence presented during Brown’s trial revealed maps of South Carolina with various targets identified. At stake was something existential: control of the entire Black race, as expressed by a Charleston grand jury in the wake of the raid. “It is proper,” the jury declared, “that the line of demarcation between the castes should be broad and distinct, more particularly at this time for reasons which need not be mentioned. It is full time that slaves and free persons of color should know and understand their position.”

Brown’s raid and the turmoil that followed had little lasting effect on the slave trade. By January 1860 prices were soaring. “Our Negro market is very brisk indeed at this time,” wrote Hector Davis, a Richmond trader. “In fact good young men are as high or higher than I ever saw them.” In Charleston that month, business at Ryan’s Mart flourished, with at least eight slave auctions involving 658 enslaved Black men, women, and children, including infants and toddlers.

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...

a severe drought that settled over the South, from Georgia to Texas, and lasted from July through the following autumn. In Texas it caused the tinderbox conditions that were likely the true culprit in the fires alleged to have been lit by slaves. The cotton harvest fell by over 30 percent, which had the effect of not only reducing planter income but also undercutting the system of credit in which cotton served as the security that allowed planters to expand their holdings. The corn crop was hit especially hard, raising fears of famine. Food prices soared.

The approach of Election Day and the seemingly inevitable election of Lincoln seemed to many to threaten apocalypse.

Here was Alabama Row, for example, and Carolina Row, where Cottage No. 16 belonged to Robert E. Lee, who, in addition to his army career, directed three plantations and managed some two hundred enslaved Blacks owned by his late father-in-law.

Ruffin had come to see grave threat in Lincoln’s ascendance. A Lincoln presidency, he told fellow fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey, would constitute “the beginning of a sure and speedy progress to the extermination of negro slavery and the consequent and utter ruin of the prosperity of the South.”

Though Buchanan promised to “cheerfully submit” to whatever the court decided, in fact he had secretly helped shape the court’s deliberations and knew the overall content of Taney’s opinion even before delivering his inaugural speech. Buchanan himself considered slavery to be a “moral evil” and claimed to be glad to live in a state that did not permit it; but he had no objection to Southerners’ holding slaves and blamed abolitionists for making slavery such a contentious issue. He hoped Taney’s decision would at last end the slavery debate.

“Thus this great and important measure, which I have so long anxiously desired, is adopted,” Ruffin wrote, “and on this hereafter glorious day, the 10th of November, is inaugurated the revolution which will tear the slave-holding states from their connection with the Northern section and establish their separate independence.”

Lincoln’s election and the prospect of the South’s coming under the authority of a Black Republican government had caused a spontaneous, universal upwelling of indignation, wrote Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, president of South Carolina College, in a public letter to the Richmond Enquirer. “You might as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them from secession. They drive politicians before them like sheep.”

For the slaveholding states, his election conjured the real possibility of abolition and its inevitable—and intolerable—consequence, the utter loss of control over the Black race. On November 22, 1860, James Clement Furman, a prominent Baptist minister and first president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, published an open letter that encapsulated the South’s great abiding fear of what would happen if slavery were abolished. “Then every negro in South Carolina and every other Southern State will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you.” Another Southern orator, quoted in the New York Herald, issued an even more vivid warning. “What will you do with these people? Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your States, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be president of the United States?”

For Mary Chesnut in Charleston, Lincoln’s election was deeply troubling. She sensed that suddenly the tension in the nation had become something more than mere North-South rivalry. To her, his election augured war.

Mary had a clear-eyed view of slavery. She had lived among enslaved men and women all her life and understood that it was the foundation of Southern society. She opposed abolition and called Lincoln a “horrid black republican ogre.” But she loathed the institution’s most unsavory aspect, the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls. “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity!” she wrote. “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over.”

Carolina would undoubtedly secede and was perfectly willing to go out alone, he wrote, but added he felt strongly that the state should make its exit in company with others. “What she desires,” he wrote, exercising his penchant for deploying feminine pronouns to refer to the state, “is a Southern Slaveholding Confederacy and to exemplify to the world the perfection of our civilization, the immensity of our resources and that the wonderful progress of these United States is mainly due to us.”