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

by Erik Larson

Sumter’s unofficial infantryman, Peter Hart, the New York City police officer who had accompanied Anderson’s wife on her surprise visit to the fort, set off through the smoke and fire and came back with a long spar to replace the shattered flagstaff. Hart also retrieved the flag and nailed it by its edge to the spar. He then fixed the spar to a gun carriage on the parapet level, all this while fully exposed to Confederate fire. Once again the wind caught the flag. It did not fly as high as it had, but it did fly, and in impossibly dramatic fashion. Its new height was not enough to overtop the smoke billowing from the fort, but at intervals wind gusts created temporary clearings that revealed the flag gamely flying amid striations of smoke.

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Mortar rounds fell among Sumter’s barracks and officers quarters, where they started fresh fires. As the flames spread, the risk grew that even the barrels of powder rescued from the magazine would explode. Anderson ordered all but five thrown into the sea through the embrasures. He understood that this decision had broader consequences than simply helping preserve the safety of his garrison. The powder in the five remaining barrels would be consumed quickly, leaving the fort unable to fight.

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At Sumter the effort to fight the inferno and to jettison the endangered powder caused a reduction in the rate of fire from the fort’s guns, “a shot every two or three minutes to let them know we were not giving up yet,” wrote Private Thompson. Sumter became a cauldron of heat, smoke, and lacerating shrapnel. One soldier suffered a severe but not mortal injury, “a large piece of shell tearing some frightful flesh wounds in his legs,” Thompson wrote.

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Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.

The closer he got to Charleston, the wilder the celebrations became, the more visceral the declamations of hatred for the North and of the willingness to kill to sustain some inchoate standard of Southern life, foremost of which was the right to enslave Blacks.

The jubilation reached the level of spectacle when the train passed through Goldsboro, North Carolina, the first significant town Russell had come to since leaving Portsmouth that morning. “The station, the hotels, the street through which the rail ran was filled with an excited mob all carrying arms, with signs here and there of a desire to get up some kind of uniform—flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for ‘Jeff Davis’ and ‘the Southern Confederacy,’ so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with ‘Dixie’s Land.’ ” Russell believed that these expressions of passion and determination could lead to only one outcome. “The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words

these expressions of passion and determination could lead to only one outcome. “The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words United States, the intense hatred of the Yankee on the part of these people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them,” Russell wrote.

For Charleston’s enslaved and free Blacks the celebrations of their white overmen seemed to have little meaning. As Russell walked back to his hotel, a heavy bell began to ring, and he was passed by a swiftly moving mass of humanity, “the evening drove of Negroes, male and female, shuffling through the streets in all haste, in order to escape the patrol and the last peal of the curfew bell.”

Lincoln would tell an aide, “Of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

The “expiation” Lee had feared, what Mary Lincoln called “this hideous nightmare,” had come to pass, killing 750,000 Americans.

planters grieved a more venal loss: The end of slavery cost them three hundred million dollars in human capital overnight.

Two months earlier, Charleston’s mayor, Charles Macbeth, had surrendered the city to a force of Black soldiers, the 21st Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry.

the naïveté that had marked the attitudes of both sides in the months after Lincoln’s election, with both convinced that any war between North and South would be brief and tidy, spilling only enough blood “to fill a lady’s thimble.” They knew only what limited war looked like and lacked the visual memory and lexical tools to imagine a conflagration that would deposit corpses in their gardens, on their streets, and among the cotton bolls of their plantations.

Their Cornfields, Wheatfields, Peach Orchards, Farms, Hills, Knolls, Creeks, Rivers, etc. Use in video series.

James Henry Hammond, the planter and former U.S. senator who had coined the phrase “cotton is king,” and whose proslavery writings had so influenced the South, had written nothing in his diary for over three years. He resumed making entries two days after the surrender. It became a chronicle both of his own physical decline and of his despair at the effects of war, though he had come to believe it was necessary; that only separation from the Union could save the South from abolition and the inevitable slave insurrections that would accompany it. But he recognized that the war had become something far worse than anyone had anticipated. “The War,” he wrote in 1862, “is gradually becoming on both sides one of fire and sword and extermination. Dreadful, dreadful.” He remained a believer in the power of cotton to solve the South’s ills. “The Abolitionists can only do wanton cruelties inflicting horrid suffering on us to no purpose, for Cotton is King and the African must be a slave, or there’s an end of all things, and soon.”

Keep this in mind when talking to a Lost Causer.

The surge and retreat of Union forces across Virginia forced Edmund Ruffin and his family to flee his Marlbourne and Beechwood plantations. When Union soldiers occupied them, they made it clear they bore a grievance against the family, especially Edmund, for his role as an instigator of secession and for having triggered the Civil War with that first shot at Fort Sumter. Beechwood in particular became the object of their animus. On August 17, a Sunday, Ruffin and his son Edmund, Jr., rode to the plantation after receiving word that it had recently been evacuated by its Yankee occupiers. They found the lawn strewn with feathers from ruptured featherbeds. To Ruffin the pattern of damage revealed something other than simple plunder: This was personal. His bookcases and desk were broken and twenty years of correspondence stolen. Many other items had disappeared as well, including all the bells the Ruffins had used to summon their slaves. The occupiers saved their worst for the interior walls. Soldiers used these as a target for spitting wads of chewed tobacco and appeared to have taken particular effort to do so. They signed their names—Ruffin counted thirty-one—and scrawled obscenities. It was here that the soldiers’ enmity toward him, personally, bore clearest expression. One soldier cut to the heart of it: “You did fire the first gun on Sumter, you traitor son of a bitch.”

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He could not resist one final wail of anti-Union fury. In the last formal paragraph of his diary, he wrote, “I here declare my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connection with Yankees—and to the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living southerner, and bequeath them to every one yet to be born!”

Use in video series. Anti-American, racist, traitor.