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

by Erik Larson

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. Everywhere he saw the new Confederate flag—the first iteration, called the “Stars and Bars”: three broad horizontal bands of red and white, and a blue square in the upper-left corner with seven white stars, one for each seceded state. This flag would prove dangerously problematic, mistaken in battle for the American Stars and Stripes. A new flag would soon take its place, designed by General Beauregard, to prevent confusion: a perfect square, with a diagonal blue cross on a red background, and stars on the blue shafts of the cross—the flag that would grace Southern picnics and fly over Southern courthouses well into the twenty-first century.