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

by Erik Larson

From the start of his political career Buchanan had demonstrated a pronounced affinity for Southerners and the South, despite having lived his whole life in Pennsylvania, where he owned a three-story, seventeen-room mansion called Wheatland situated on twenty-two acres of plantation-like grounds outside Lancaster. In the political vernacular of the time, this made Buchanan a “dough face,” someone who seems outwardly to be one thing but is actually another. The South returned the affection: In the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan won almost universal support from the slaveholding states, with only Maryland choosing to stray. Four of Buchanan’s cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states’ rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family. This closeness had the effect of limiting his ability to view the political landscape with any degree of impartiality and caused him to act in ways that skirted the line between mere favoritism and treason. As Senator Seward noted in a letter to his wife, Frances, “The White House is abandoned to the seceders. They eat, drink, and ...

Buchanan’s address opened with a question that captured the perplexity many felt about Southern unrest. After observing that the country had experienced a greater surge in prosperity than any nation before it, Buchanan asked: “Why is it, then, that discontent now so extensively prevails, and the Union of the States, which is the source of all these blessings, is threatened with destruction?” He promptly answered: It was all the North’s fault. What caused the current crisis, he said, was Northern antislavery agitation that had inspired “vague notions of freedom” among enslaved people. “Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar,” he said, meaning the Southern family altar. In its place had risen a fear of slave insurrections. “Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning,” he wrote. If this fear deepened and became pervasive, he warned, “then disunion will become inevitable.”

In a brief address accepting the presidency of the convention, Jamison first ran through a list of offenses committed by the North against the South, dating to the Missouri Compromise, but omitting any direct reference to the great fear that had really brought all these men here: that Lincoln might abolish slavery.

The delegates gathered twelve hours later at Charleston’s Institute Hall, the largest such hall in the city, with capacity for three thousand people. Something about the place seemed to foster divisiveness. The proslavery Democratic Party had met there the previous April and blew apart, leaving a Northern and a Southern variant, virtually assuring Lincoln’s election—exactly the outcome that pro-secession radicals had hoped for in the belief that his election would cause every slave state to flee the Union.

Thursday, December 20, when, shortly before one p.m., the committee charged with writing the secession ordinance presented its handiwork to the convention for final approval. By now, thanks to heavy editing by Robert Barnwell Rhett meant to pare the wording down to its simplest elements and thus avoid the risk of further debate, the ordinance was a spare 137 words long. It concluded: “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

As they entered the hall, a roar rose from the three thousand spectators who had crammed themselves within, a level of riotous cheer that in fact had been absent those eighty-four years earlier when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. According to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush, they did so then amid a “pensive and awful silence,” convinced they were signing “what was believed by many at the time to be our own death warrants.”

On Christmas Eve, South Carolina’s secession convention issued a formal “Declaration” to explain to the larger world why the state had decided to exit the Union, composed by delegate Christopher G. Memminger. Unlike the colonial Declaration of Independence with its stirring and forward-looking deposition that all men were created equal (a concept Edmund Ruffin dismissed as “both false and foolish”), this was a declaration of grievance. It did, however, hark back to that earlier declaration in that it quoted, inexactly, Thomas Jefferson’s famous addition, “that whenever any ‘form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.’ ” The United States, the statement argued, had broken its compact with the slaveholding states, mainly in violating the fourth article of the Constitution, which, without directly mentioning slavery, nonetheless made it clear that slaves were property, and that all escaped slaves had to be returned to their rightful owners. The convention’s declaration also cited the 1778 Articles of Confederation, which asserted that each “State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” the base upon which Southern polemicists had built their case for secession—never mind that in asserting such rights the declaration also indirectly provided justification for the personal-liberty laws that Northern states had passed to prevent the seizure of...

Into this farrago of rubbish and iron came the families: Mrs. Hammer, wife of Artillery Sergeant William H., with their two children; Mrs. Neilen, wife of Private Patrick, and their three; and twenty other children, including a couple of infants, and their mothers.

Sumter’s Pvt. John Thompson, an artillery man from Northern Ireland,

Pvt. John Thompson,

Anderson’s move enraged the Carolina commissioners in Washington, who saw it as a complete betrayal of Buchanan’s pledge not to alter the military status quo in Charleston. By now that murky pledge might as well have been engraved in marble. Their honor bruised, their hubris abruptly deflated, the commissioners composed a peevish note to the president. In prose that dripped presumption, they told Buchanan that they had initially planned to negotiate “with the earnest desire to avoid all unnecessary and hostile collision, and so to inaugurate our new relations as to secure mutual respect, general advantage, and a future of good will and harmony, beneficial to all the parties concerned. But the events of the last twenty-four hours render such an assurance impossible.” They demanded that Buchanan immediately withdraw all federal forces from Charleston Harbor. “Under present circumstances they are a standing menace which renders negotiation impossible, and, as our recent experience shows, threatens speedily to bring to a bloody issue questions which ought to be settled with temperance and judgment.” With the help of Secretary of State Black and Attorney General Stanton, Buchanan drafted a reply. He told the commissioners that upon learning of Anderson’s move, “my first promptings were to command him to return to his former position.” But then he learned that state authorities, “without waiting or asking for an explanation,” had acted within hours to seize the other forts. Evac...

“When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”

The wild passion for secession was, she acknowledged, a kind of insanity in itself. She told Felton she had found evidence of a rapidly advancing plot to assassinate Lincoln and take over the government.

corporal, Francis J. Oakes,

The state’s forces—planters, planters’ sons; the chivalry—held themselves to an almost cult-like sense of honor that would leave them no choice but to fire back with every gun at their disposal. They seemed, in fact, to be hoping for just such a pretext.

lieutenant, R. K. Meade,

On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. The delegates were very clear about their motivation. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” they wrote in their official declaration. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

A howl of indignation and hurt feelings rose from each of the fifteen claims in the declaration, each a single sentence long. All attributed the state’s action to the Union’s enduring “hostility” to slavery. The declaration depicted this hostility as a corporeal villain, an “it” having a multitude of destructive powers. “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst,” one claim asserted. The next: “It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and the schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.”

A Richmond newspaper came right out and demanded that Maryland and Virginia take steps to block Lincoln’s inauguration. The South-leaning New York Day Book, breathing fire, called upon the South to “save the republic of Washington from the taint of n—rism;—they must expel Lincoln and his free-n—r horde from the federal district.”

What Seward had not addressed in his speech, and perhaps did not truly understand, was that at this point in the crisis, the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons. Yet the chivalry, thanks to Edmund Ruffin, James Hammond, and others, had persuaded themselves of a different reality: Slavery was a positive good; it was endorsed by the Bible and by anthropological observation; even two famed Northern anthropologists, Louis Agassiz and Charles Morton, both of Harvard, no less, had proclaimed on the basis of purportedly scientific research that the Black race was not only inferior, but a different species altogether. If slavery was good, then slaveowners were good, and anyone who said otherwise abraded their honor, something no Southerner could forgive. Lincoln had only a partial grasp of this reality. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended,” Lincoln wrote in a December letter to Alexander “Little Ellick” Stephens, the Georgia congressman, “while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.” But it was here in this clash of ...

His adjutant and quartermaster, Lt. Norman Hall,

Lt. Theodore Talbot,

Southern states were moving rapidly to occupy federal forts and arsenals.

Ruffin was back in Charleston by one o’clock the next afternoon; the following day, Sunday, January 13, he joined South Carolina Secretary of War Jamison on a tour of the forts in Charleston Harbor that had been seized by state forces after Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter. Their steamer carried various engineers and civilian volunteers, as well as “100 negro slaves, sent by their owners gratuitously, to work on the fortifications,” Ruffin wrote.

Enslaved Blacks hauled and piled sand to be used in building protective mounds and to fill sandbags; the white volunteers directed the action and moved sand in wheelbarrows to various parts of the fort. Ruffin stood for a time near where the slaves dumped their sand and the soldiers loaded it into the barrows.

Pvt. Samuel Millens,

The choice of Montgomery did make a certain sense, however, in that it was the center of the domestic slave trade in Alabama and for much of the Deep South. Scores of enslaved Blacks arrived daily by riverboat and by train, and by overland coffles, to be deposited in slave “depots,” or pens, located throughout the city. On Market alone there were nine businesses engaged in trading, auctioning, or investing in slaves, and at least eight pens where men, women, and children alike were stored before sale. A slave pen on South Decatur Street stood just a block from the capitol. Additional depots and trading houses operated from side streets. The city’s slave auctions were typically held at the Artesian Basin, which made slave shopping about as convenient as possible. The state courthouse stood on an adjacent corner for the filing of slave mortgages, probate agreements, and other instruments; nearby stood a row of banks and insurers that specialized in financing the trade, including the founding office of a firm even then called Lehman Brothers. Advertisements in the Montgomery Daily Post touted enslaved people for sale, made available because of deaths, bankruptcies, and other legal actions. One ad offered a distinctly Southern service. Headlined “Negro Dogs,” it was posted by one W. L. Staggers, who specialized in finding escaped Blacks: “I have a first rate pack of Negro Dogs, with which I will hunt for Negroes at five dollars a day, and ten dollars for each Negro I succeed i...

It was views like Allen’s, he charged, that lay at the root of the conflict. “You think our system an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last,” Hammond wrote. “We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects. “Can you not let us alone?”

They brought retinues of Black servants and between races sold or acquired others. The jockeys were enslaved; the trainers were enslaved. White planters relied on slaves to maximize the value of their horses and in the process burnish their own social cachet.

Crawford revealed a deeper fear, one shared by many Northerners, as to the threat Lincoln might pose to the racial status quo. Crawford feared that the Republican Party had become populated with abolitionist zealots. “I abhor fanaticism and despise cant,” he wrote. “The party is full of both, and any proposition to lift the negro to the social level of the white man is to me monstrous and insane.”

“All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy, and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion of any state.”

He told Lincoln that in whatever conflict might lie ahead, it was “very important” that the secessionists be made to appear as the aggressors. “The first attempt that is made to furnish supplies or reinforcements to Sumter,” he wrote, “will induce aggression by South Carolina, and then the government will stand justified, before the entire country, in repelling that aggression.” Browning later would offer Lincoln another telling observation: “The time is not yet, but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.”

He was deeply moved, he said, to find himself standing in the place where the nation was founded. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” A loud cheer rose from his audience. He explained that the struggle for independence and the enduring nature of the resulting confederation of states had often led him to ponder what guiding principle had made it so durable. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land,” he said, “but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” Great applause, here. “It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Another round of cheering. “This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

The thing that lingered was Lincoln’s reference to equality, the uniquely American promise “that all should have an equal chance.” A reporter for the New York Herald was quick to discern the greater meaning of Lincoln’s remark: Fulfillment of that promise, he wrote, meant “nothing more or less than the progressive steps of African emancipation.”

Rives had not intended to do much speaking at the Peace Convention, but as it grew deadlocked, with each side increasingly convinced of its own virtue, he felt he could no longer just sit and watch. At one point he leapt to his feet and launched into a ninety-minute wholly extemporaneous plea for North and South to find a way to reunite. “I condemn the secession of States,” he said. “I detest it. But the great fact is still before us. Seven states have gone out from among us.” Coercion to bring them back would solve nothing, he warned. “You may spend millions of treasure, you may shed oceans of blood, but you cannot conquer any five or seven States of this Union.”

He had personal experience with the horrors of civil war, he told his audience, an allusion to the time he spent as America’s minister to France. “I have seen the pavements of Paris covered, and her gutters running with fraternal blood: God forbid that I should see this horrid picture repeated in my own country.”

A few days later the Peace Convention approved a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to Congress for a vote. All seven of its clauses dealt with slavery, including one nicknamed the “Never-Never” clause, which would bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery as it existed in any state or territory in the country. The seven clauses underscored the fact that for all of the South’s efforts to blame the crisis on Northern tyranny in imposing tariffs, collecting revenue, and ordaining “internal improvements,” the crux of the crisis was in fact slavery. This was obvious to all at the time, if not to members of a certain school of twentieth-century historiography who sought to cast the conflict in the bloodless terms of states’ rights. As famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “I wish that some of our evasive historians, our mufflers of great passionate issues, who are trying to persuade the American public that Negro slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, would read the debates in this Peace Convention.”

The Senate received the amendment proposed by the Peace Convention and promptly voted it into oblivion, 28 to 7. It never went to the House. But a vestige survived in the form of a parallel constitutional amendment proposed in the House by Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio and in the Senate by William Seward that guaranteed that Congress would not interfere with slavery where it currently existed. This vestigial stub fared better. The House approved it by a vote of 133 to 65; the Senate did likewise, 24 to 12. Lincoln later forwarded the proposed amendment, the original thirteenth, to all state governors, including those in the Confederacy, for ratification by their legislatures. He neither endorsed it nor denounced it. As he saw it, the amendment merely made explicit—“express and irrevocable”—a principle already embodied in the Constitution and one he himself had espoused many times. Only a few states would ultimately ratify the amendment before events made it irrelevant. Known to future centuries as the Shadow or Ghost Amendment, it remained an active congressionally approved but unratified amendment into the twenty-first century, theoretically still open to a final vote by the states.

On Friday, March 1, the Confederate States of America officially took control of military operations in Charleston. Confederate President Jefferson Davis placed engineer Beauregard in command and promoted him to brigadier general. Beauregard left for Charleston immediately. That day as well, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker wrote to Governor Pickens to assure him that President Davis shared his view “that Fort Sumter should be in our possession at the earliest moment possible.” But he added a caveat. “Thorough preparation must be made before an attack is attempted, for the first blow must be successful, both for its moral and physical consequences, or otherwise the result might be disastrous to your State in the loss of many of those whom we can least afford to lose. A failure would demoralize our people and injuriously affect us in the opinion of the world as reckless and precipitate.” In short, the Confederacy planned not only to move against Sumter, but to do so with overwhelming force to avoid the humiliation of failure.

This city, at least, was primed for war. Crews of enslaved Blacks and privileged white volunteers continued to erect and expand gun batteries and to reinforce the newly seized federal forts, Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. Volunteer soldiers marched and sang. Draft horses labored through the streets hauling gun carriages and wagons filled with ammunition to the city’s wharf for transport to the batteries rising on the harbor islands. Where once enslaved people from Africa arrived by the hundreds, bewildered and ill after enduring the horrors of the Middle Passage, their captive descendants now shouldered barrels of gunpowder, iron shielding, and heavy timbers.

Russell accepted, and on Sunday, March 3, sailed from Queenstown, Ireland, aboard the steamship Arabia. His fellow passengers included several wealthy Southerners, among them a former member of the U.S. Legation in St. Petersburg, Russia, who had quit to ally himself with the Confederacy, and a U.S. Army colonel, Robert S. Garnett of Virginia, who planned to resign his own commission and then join the Confederate army. The colonel proved to be a living primer on that mythic creature, the Southern planter. “He laughed to scorn the doctrine that all men were born equal in the sense of all men having equal rights,” Russell wrote in his diary. “Some were born to be slaves—others to follow useful mechanical arts—the rest were born to rule and to own their fellow men.” To Colonel Garnett, slavery was anything but evil. “Divine institution”—the colonel declared—“an Abolitionist opposes the laws of God himself!” He loathed Yankees. “I would die a hundred times to keep them out!” As it happened, a centile of his wish would be fulfilled five months later when he became the first Confederate general killed in the coming war.

A cheerfully decorated vehicle carried thirty-four little girls who represented the states of the Union, even those that had seceded.

That Lincoln had survived to this point was to many a surprise and a relief; but now anxiety shifted to the matter of the speech itself. In Lexington, Virginia, a pro-Union lawyer, James Davidson, wrote to a friend, “I have been looking towards Washington all day—this momentous day. Whilst I feel that Lincoln’s message will be pacific, yet I am much worried.”

Lincoln’s speech carved a line between conciliation and provocation and seemed to make no one happy, though his closing paragraph, with its mystic chords and better angels, moved many in the audience to tears and would be largely responsible for lodging his address in the pantheon of the greatest speeches ever delivered. Abolitionists and the most ardent Republicans felt he had gone too far in placating the South. Frederick Douglass found the speech disheartening. “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell,” he said, “but the result shows that we have merely a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends his knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.”

But the speech in its final form did nothing to soothe secessionist ire. One key member of the ongoing Virginia Convention, Robert Young Conrad, a Unionist, said its effect was “like an earthquake.” Confederate officials reached the immediate conclusion that it signaled hostility toward the South. Just after hearing Lincoln speak, Texas senator Louis Wigfall, never much inclined toward equanimity, telegraphed from Washington: “Inaugural means war.” But Lexington lawyer Davidson, after reading the complete speech in a newspaper, took a more judicious view. He saw it as “a somewhat Jesuitical striving to please both sides” and to avoid belligerence. “Mark it,” he wrote to a friend. “He don’t intend seriously to attempt Coercion. He knows it will fail if attempted and could serve no good purpose.” Davidson told his friend about a conversation he’d had with Lincoln toward the end of the Washington Peace Convention in which Davidson tried to ascertain Lincoln’s attitude toward the use of force. “There will be no necessity for coercion,” Lincoln told him. “That word is misunderstood and misinterpreted. No armies ever will be marched through the Southern States.” Davidson, hoping to draw Lincoln out, said, “Suppose South Carolina—” Lincoln cut him off. “If I am struck at, may I not strike back?” Davidson hoped to provoke Lincoln into revealing more. “Aggression,” Davidson said, “might change the case.” “If we have a government let us know it,” Lincoln said, playfully (in Davidson...

“It settles the question that there must be war,” he wrote in his diary that day. Like so many in the South, Ruffin saw in the address what he had primed himself to see. He noted that Confederate General Beauregard had just taken charge of Charleston’s defense. Ruffin expected Beauregard to attack Sumter and hoped that Lincoln would trigger an immediate conflict by launching an expedition to send troops and supplies to the fort. “I earnestly hope,” he wrote, “that this may be the beginning, and if war is to occur, that such attempt to reinforce may be made before another week passes.” He was gratified to see that the crowd standing around him at the bulletin board shared his enthusiasm. “I heard not a single expression of regret or of apprehension,” he wrote, “but on the contrary, many of gratification that things would now be brought to an issue.”

Goodbess, their blood was up and there was nobody stopping them. They were crazy!

On Inauguration Day, while making her rounds in Montgomery, Mary encountered a scene that occurred routinely in the city and throughout the South but that left her feeling heart-sunk and unnerved, so much so that she had to sit down on a stool in a nearby shop. “I saw today a sale of Negroes,” she wrote. She had come across a slave auction in progress. A mulatto woman stood on a raised platform high enough to be seen above the crowd. “Mulatto women in silk dresses—one girl was on the stand. Nice looking—like my Nancy”—this a reference to her own enslaved maid. In a later much-modified version of her journal meant for publication, she added detail: “She was magnificently got up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all—sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest, but her mouth never relaxed from its expanded grin of excitement.” Something about the moment caved Mary’s spirits. “South Carolina slave holder as I am my very soul sickened,” she wrote. “It is too dreadful. I tried to reason—this is not worse than the willing sale most women make of themselves in marriage—nor can the consequences be worse. The Bible authorizes marriage and slavery—poor women! poor slaves!”

Secretary Seward, for his part, understood that the administration could never recognize the Confederacy, let alone signal that it considered the commissioners to be bona fide representatives of any government entity. If they insisted on a formal answer, he knew, he would have to issue an official declaration turning them down—in effect, denying their existence. And this, he believed, was the surest path to war.

Life at Sumter was not all centered on sowing death and mayhem. Along with board games and cards, the men played leapfrog and, according to Asst. Surgeon Crawford, “ball.” He did not specify what kind, but it was likely a variant of baseball, by then a popular sport that fellow officer Captain Doubleday would often, wrongly, be credited with inventing. They fished for blackfish and eels. On Sundays, when the weather allowed, they rowed a six-oared barge around the fort’s perimeter.

Firing a heavy gun was an art, and a dangerous one; practice was necessary. A mistake at the wrong moment could be fatal. A typical gunnery crew, as specified by the Army’s Heavy Ordnance Manual of 1861, had seven men—a gunner and six cannoneers. The gunner directed the action. In casual usage, however, the term gunner could be used to describe all members of the crew. Among artillery men, a cannon was known as a “piece.” Three cannoneers stood on each side of the barrel about three yards apart; the gunner, also known as the “chief of piece,” stood behind and to the left. Various “accoutrements” lay nearby to be used in loading the gun and adjusting its position and for the all-important step of sponging the barrel between each shot. The gunner’s pouch, which contained various tools for sighting the gun, was hung from the “cascabel,” the knob at the rear of the barrel, as was the “tube-pouch,” which contained the firing lanyard and ignition devices, called friction tubes. The ammunition was piled to the left of the cannon’s muzzle. On the gunner’s command From Battery! the men used long, heavy poles of wood, or handspikes, to back the gun away from the embrasure. The gunner guided the process by repeating the command Heave! The cannoneers positioned their spikes at various points under the gun carriage and levered the gun far enough away from the wall to allow access to its muzzle. Next the gunner shouted Load! If the gun had just been fired, the first step was to shove a ...