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

by Erik Larson

Having thus indeed dared, the delegates choreographed a signing ceremony meant to rival the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The convention adjourned at three forty-five, then reassembled at six-thirty that evening at St. Andrews Hall in order to march in procession back to Institute Hall—now “Secession Hall”—for the ceremony, set to begin at seven o’clock. The delegates were met at the base of the steps by the state’s leading legislators, wearing ceremonial robes, who then led the delegates up the steps and into the hall. President Jamison carried the sacred ordinance, which by now had been printed on a piece of linen parchment measuring roughly two feet by two feet, and embossed with the Great Seal of South Carolina (designed tellingly in 1776). 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.” There was no such dread evident at Secession Hall. This was now strictly a legal matter, a contract broken, a compact dissolved; no hard feelings; even that lofty oracle of public sentiment, Horace Greeley, had said, “Go in peace.”