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

by Erik Larson

Seward, too, was growing frustrated. He still hoped to evacuate Sumter to buy time for the realization of his dream of Union restoration despite the Cabinet’s decision to resupply the fortress. He remained convinced that a deep reservoir of pro-Union sentiment existed in the South and that a period of calm would bring it to the surface. Lincoln, meanwhile, seemed overwhelmed and distracted by the petty responsibilities of establishing his government. In a March 26 letter to Charles Francis Adams, Seward complained that Lincoln had “no conception of his situation.”

But here Seward sensed opportunity. The administration’s disarray seemed to create an avenue for him to step forward and exercise the power he all along presumed himself to wield. On April 1, he sent Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration” that he had written after consultation with two allies, Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal, and Henry J. Raymond of the New-York Times. Seward’s handwriting was so abysmal that he had his son Frederick copy the memorandum in his own hand. To avoid the prying eyes of intermediaries, Frederick carried it directly to Lincoln. The text was critical of Lincoln in an insinuative manner. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward began. “This, however, is not culpable, and it has been unavoidable.” He understood that the need to fill patronage positions and secure Senate confirmations had distracted the president from other more serious matters. “But,” Seward wrote, “further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.” He again urged that Fort Sumter should be surrendered and Fort Pickens retained, and, further, proposed that Lincoln consider engineering a war with France or Spain to distract the nation from the secession crisis.

Seward fully expected Lincoln to endorse his proposals, according to a witness, New-York Times correspondent James B. Swain—so certain, in fact, that he had arranged in advance for Weed’s Journal and Raymond’s Times to publish the memorandum along with Lincoln’s expected response. The two editors would then launch an aggressive editorial campaign to support Seward’s twin goals of evacuating Sumter and conjuring a pro-Union resurgence in the South, while also emphasizing that he alone could achieve them. The Times was ready. The paper held open a portion of its front page ordinarily devoted to national news; correspondent Swain waited in Washington to receive Seward’s memorandum and Lincoln’s reply and then telegraph them to New York.

Blinded perhaps by his own sense of self-importance, Seward had misread his employer. What he did not recognize yet was that there was steel in this Illinois lawyer and that it glinted most keenly when adversaries challenged his resolve. “It is a little difficult to imagine what must have been the feelings of a President…on receiving from his principal councilor and anticipated mainstay of his Administration such a series of proposals,” Nicolay and Hay would later write in their biography of Lincoln. Another president might have fired Seward on the spot, but Lincoln certainly understood that Seward was a talented statesman and shrewd politician, and that his sudden departure at this moment would add more confusion to an already chaotic situation.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 3, a 180-ton schooner, the Rhoda H. Shannon, en route from Boston to Savannah with a load of ice, arrived at what its captain, Joseph Marts, believed to be the entrance to the Savannah River off Tybee Island. Powerful winds scoured the sea and raised a spume that impaired his ability to locate navigational waypoints. Hoping to draw the attention of a distant pilot vessel, he ordered one of his crew to display an American flag in the schooner’s fore-rigging. No pilot approached. Captain Marts decided to proceed anyway, despite the rough surf. He ordered the flag taken down and continued onward, until he realized that this was not, after all, the Savannah River. In fact, he had entered Charleston Harbor seventy-five miles to the north.

In the course of the evening’s conversation, Russell heard much about the South’s obsession with honor, including a vehement defense of dueling. “The man who dares tamper with the honor of a white woman knows what he has to expect,” one guest said. “We shoot him down like a dog, and no jury in the South will ever find any man guilty of murder for punishing such a scoundrel.” The commissioners revealed an intractable belief that Northern men were cowards. As evidence, they cited the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner, a fervent critic of slavery, in the Senate chamber and his refusal to challenge his attacker to a manly duel.

The evening reinforced Russell’s growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety.

They were accustomed to mastery and command and proficient in the art of taking offense; they needed the unalloyed respect of all around them. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed this aspect of the planter class two decades earlier in his Democracy in America and attributed it to slavery. “The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy,” he wrote. “The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”

On that Sunday, General Beauregard notified Anderson that the fort would no longer be permitted to acquire any supplies from Charleston. The halt, Beauregard wrote, was ordered by the Confederate government in Montgomery “in consequence of the delays and vacillations of the United States Government at Washington relative to the evacuation of Fort Sumter.” The mails, however, would continue.

The ship exited New York Harbor into a full-on Atlantic gale. The Baltic was well designed and handled the seas well, but the storm impeded and scattered the rest of Fox’s fleet, especially the ocean tugboats. It forced the Uncle Ben to seek shelter in the harbor at Wilmington, North Carolina. Another tug, the Yankee, was blown past Charleston and found refuge in Savannah. The tug Freeborn avoided the storm altogether: Deeming the risks of the expedition simply too great, its owners decided at the last minute to hold the vessel in New York. Fox did not know any of this. He had no means of communicating with other ships except by visual signaling or veering close enough to shout. As best he could tell, his plan for the relief of Fort Sumter was unfolding exactly as planned, if probably a bit behind schedule because of the gale. He expected to find the other ships of his fleet waiting for him just outside the entrance to Charleston Harbor. He would be especially happy to see the Powhatan, its troops and powerful guns at the ready.

In ordinary times, no honorable man would open another man’s mail, but these times were decidedly not ordinary. As Pickens would explain it shortly afterward in a letter to Montgomery, “I did this because I consider a state of war is now inaugurated by the authorities at Washington, and all information of a public nature was necessary to us.” One of the men passed the mail bag to Judge Magrath, apparently in hopes that his judicial stature would confer upon the act a level of respectability. The judge would not touch it, according to one witness. “No,” Magrath said, “I have too recently been a United States’ Judge, and have been in the habit of sentencing people to the penitentiary for this sort of thing, so, Governor, let General Beauregard open them.”

Of all the ships assigned to his own expedition, only one was present, the Harriet Lane, and it had experienced a near mutiny. En route to Charleston, its captain, John Faunce, found himself confronting an unhappy crew. The ship, ordinarily assigned to the Treasury Department, was a dozen hours south of New York when Faunce opened sealed orders that told him for the first time where he was headed and what his objective would be. The orders included instructions for Faunce to lower the flags that identified the ship as a Treasury vessel and replace them with those of the U.S. Navy. The ship’s crew, accustomed to the relatively tame occupation of collecting taxes and customs fees, balked. Fighting a battle at sea, they grumbled, was not in their bailiwick.

Across the bay, in Charleston, word spread quickly as to the time when the bombardment would begin. To Capt. Samuel Ferguson, the Beauregard aide-de-camp, it seemed as though everyone in the city were converging on the Battery esplanade and the wharves along the eastern flank of the city to await the start of the firing. Many others, he saw, watched from windows and rooftops. As the moment approached, the crowd went quiet. “The silence became oppressive,” Ferguson wrote; “it was weird, unnatural in so dense a throng, and seemed almost as though the Angel of Death had already passed over.”

This was Ruffin’s cue. He yanked the lanyard on his gun. The resulting blast launched a sixty-four-pound exploding shell that soared off into the darkness and struck the fort’s parapet at its northeast corner. Hitting an immense fortress roughly a mile away was still considered an act of remarkable accuracy, especially for an initial firing. Ruffin could take no credit, however. The big gun had been aimed by its more experienced attendants.

Despite a punishing barrage from the Confederate batteries, Fort Sumter still did not return fire. Round after round poured into the fort or burst overhead. An hour passed, and none of Sumter’s guns replied. Then two hours. It made Ruffin uneasy. This was, after all, an affair of honor. There was nothing manly or chivalric about firing at an opponent who would not fire back. In fact, the Code Duello forbade it and dismissed such behavior as “children’s play.” Ruffin and his fellow militia feared a repeat of the caning of Charles Sumner, who endured a withering attack but did not strike his assailant.

It became apparent that the Confederate batteries had begun firing “hot shot,” cannonballs heated in furnaces. One or two balls came to rest inside the fort, where one of them set a man’s bed on fire. At about nine o’clock, a shell from a mortar burst through the roof of the officers quarters. Heavy smoke rose from within. The location of the fire was too exposed to allow men to effectively fight it, Foster realized. He alerted Anderson that if the fire continued to burn out of control, it could detonate the fort’s cache of gunpowder, the thirty thousand pounds stored in barrels in Sumter’s main magazine.

Mary marveled at the calm of the Black servants in the house. Some were employees hired out by their owners, each wearing the required badge. Other enslaved servants were brought along by the families lodged within. “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants,” Mary wrote. “Laurence”—her husband’s enslaved valet—“sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they solidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”

The loss of Sumter’s flag was for Anderson and his men a heartbreaking and humiliating event. The flag was a tactile representation of nationhood. In merely firing on it, the Confederates who claimed so noisily to revere honor had engaged in a singularly dishonorable act. To bring it down by gunfire was heinous beyond measure.

For Captain Doubleday, gallantry was fine, but he wanted a more concrete form of redress. Before the bombardment began he had noticed through his spyglass that Moultrie House, the resort hotel on Sullivan’s Island up the beach from Fort Moultrie, was full of what appeared to be Confederate officers and troops using the hotel as a barracks. The hotel was an airy two-story structure with piazzas surrounding each level. Doubleday directed two of his gun crews to take aim at the second story, then ordered them to fire. Two forty-two-pound cannonballs sailed toward the hotel, their passage through the sky visible to a careful watcher. “The crashing of the shot, which went through the whole length of the building among the clapboards and interior partitions, must have been something fearful to those who were within,” wrote Doubleday with evident glee. “They came rushing out in furious haste, and tumbled over each other until they reached the bottom of the front steps, in one writhing, tumultuous mass.” The shots killed no one.

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. Without food and powder, they would need to surrender soon—unless the U.S. ships outside the bar managed to deliver the promised men and supplies.

At about this time a cannonball fired from one of the Confederate guns at Fort Moultrie splashed into the water just ahead of Wigfall’s boat. To Private Young it seemed obvious that this was meant as a warning shot to compel the boat to turn around. He said as much to Wigfall. But Wigfall huffed that Fort Moultrie had no say in whether he completed his mission. The boat proceeded. “In a few moments,” Young wrote, “we had another shot so near, it looked as if it was intended to hit us.” In this he was correct, as he discovered later from Moultrie’s commander, Colonel Ripley. When Wigfall’s boat did not stop after the first shot across its bow, Ripley had decided to sink it, reasoning that some self-aggrandizing politician seeking glory was meddling in something that was none of his business.

True to his promise, Wigfall took Private Young with him, this time in a sturdier boat. Several officers joined them, including Col. James Chesnut, Mary’s husband, and John L. Manning, her co-flirtationist. They brought the flag of the Palmetto Guard on a staff and flew it from the boat. The route took them close to Fort Sumter, where they saw members of Anderson’s garrison sitting on the exterior esplanade for respite from the smoke and fire within. Deeming it ungentlemanly to keep the palmetto flag prominently displayed when passing so near, Wigfall ordered it dipped out of respect for what the Union men had been through.

At the forty-seventh shot, a private named Daniel Hough—“an excellent soldier,” Doubleday said—loaded a cartridge into one of the guns. Apparently the barrel had not been thoroughly sponged after the preceding shot. The cartridge exploded and tore the private’s arm off; the blast killed him in an instant. Sparks then detonated other cartridges hidden under nearby debris and caused a second blast that blew the adjacent gunners into the air. One of these, Pvt. Edward Galloway, would later die in a Charleston hospital. Four others were injured but survived. The salute was suspended to give the garrison time to dig a grave in the parade for Private Hough. The private was placed in a coffin. Confederate and Union soldiers stood at attention on opposite sides of the grave. As the coffin was lowered, they solemnly presented arms. Confederate and Union soldiers alike removed their caps and stood at attention. “A unique and most impressive sight,” wrote Beauregard aide Captain Ferguson, “considering the fact that only a few hours before they were actively engaged in trying by every known means to destroy each other.”

Something had begun, though exactly what was not yet clear. Was this the start of a war, or the beginning of a new relationship between the Confederacy and the Union? As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously. The Confederacy had reduced and seized one of the most powerful forts in the land, the symbol of Northern tyranny, as three of the Union’s warships stood by. That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand. To the religiously inclined, it was a miracle and seemed a harbinger of peace ahead. Few among South Carolina’s chivalry expected that a real war would result; and even if war did come, they believed it would be short and unremarkable. A common expression often attributed to Col. James Chesnut forecast that the total amount of blood likely to be shed in a war over secession would fill “a lady’s thimble.” Chesnut also made the vivid pledge to drink whatever blood actually did get shed. 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. 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.

On Monday, April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for “the several States of the Union” to muster their militias and contribute a total of seventy-five thousand troops for the suppression of rebellious “combinations” in the seceded states and to reassert the authority of U.S. law.

He forecast that the first mission of this sudden new army “will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union,” though he added that “utmost care” would be taken “to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.” With that second reference to property, Lincoln sought to signal his continued commitment to protect slavery where it already existed, in the persistent hope that the border states and the upper South might still remain in the Union. Virginia was still undecided about whether to secede; delegates to its ongoing convention continued to debate the matter.

In Virginia, the sword at last fell: On April 17 the state’s long-seated convention voted to secede. Even staunch pro-unionist William Rives voted in favor, stating, “The Government being already overthrown by revolution, I vote ‘aye.’ ”

Arkansas followed, approving secession 65 to 5; a public vote ratified it on May 6. North Carolina and Tennessee acted next. One delegate to North Carolina’s convention wrote, “This furor, this moral epidemic, swept over the country like a tempest, before which the entire populations seemed to succumb.” The border states—Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware—did not leave the Union, but they balked at Lincoln’s demand for volunteers.

It was the crucible hour—the time for all to declare their loyalty, whether to nation or section. Caught up in the crisis was Virginia resident Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, whom General Scott considered to be the Army’s finest field officer. Lee was fifty-four, a storied veteran of the Mexican War, former superintendent of West Point, and the man who had quashed John Brown’s insurrection. Acting through an intermediary—Francis Blair, father of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—Lincoln offered Lee command of all Union land forces. That same day Lee learned that Virginia had seceded.

For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, “If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” He needed time. He spent two days in personal torment considering the offer before formally notifying General Scott in a letter on April 20 that he had decided to resign from the Army. He would have done it “at once,” he told Scott, “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed.”

On the day Lincoln called for troops, London Times correspondent William Russell was midway through his journey south. He was struck by the primitive appearance of the kingdom through which his train passed. The tracks skirted the “Dismal Swamp” and plunged through what Russell called a primordial forest. At first he entertained himself by looking for alligators and large turtles, but this became monotonous. Soon he saw crude farms populated with worn-looking cattle and pigs and worn-looking people. “The women, palefaced, were tawdry and ragged; the men, yellow, seedy looking. For the first time in the States, I noticed barefooted people.” Nonetheless, much to Russell’s amazement, at stations along the way these bleak forests yielded sophisticated travelers waiting for the train. “It really was most astonishing to see well-dressed, respectable looking men and women emerge out of the ‘dismal swamp’ and out of the depths of the forest, with silk parasols and crinoline, bandboxes and portmanteaus, in the most civilized style.” They were tended by enslaved men and women “handling the baggage or the babies, and looking comfortable enough, but not happy.”

Justice came in circles. Sumter had fallen on April 14, 1861; now, four years later, President Lincoln wanted the American flag to again fly over the fort and wanted its former commander, Robert Anderson, to raise it. He left the choreography to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had replaced Simon Cameron. Stanton directed that the flag-raising take place during a public ceremony at Sumter—or what was left of it—at noon on April 14, 1865, exactly four years to the day after Anderson and his men had evacuated the fort. They would use the same flag.

Four years of shelling by Union guns, including near constant bombardment over the previous year and a half, had reduced it to a rounded hillock of earth and shattered masonry. One discernible wall remained, dented and scaled by the impacts of hardshot and explosive shells. 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.

In the years following the attack on Sumter, Major Anderson’s health suffered. Lincoln had promoted him to brigadier general in charge of the Army’s Department of Kentucky, but Anderson could not tolerate the demands and sought medical help. According to the assessment of his doctor, R.M.J. Jackson, he exhibited “a frequent feeling of weariness and lassitude, incapacity to continue muscle exertion for any length of time, a consciousness of exhaustion from the most ordinary exercise, and occasional pain in the forehead and eyes.” To Jackson, the cause of these “morbid phenomena” was obvious: the intense stress of his Sumter experience, namely the protracted “anxiety,” the “painfully oppressive day and night watches,” and all the other events “necessarily experienced by a man who was doomed to watch the sharpening of the knife which was to cut his own throat.” The doctor ordered a recuperative stay in the Allegheny Mountains at an “Orphan Sanitarium” until his health returned.

By now the old warrior had grown weary. For about a year, Ruffin had been living at a plantation in Amelia County, Virginia, that Edmund, Jr., had acquired as a safe haven away from likely zones of conflict closer to Richmond. Loneliness per se did not afflict him; but age, various infirmities, and seemingly boundless tedium had worn him down. “Under these circumstances,” he wrote, “my life has become a wearisome and galling burden to myself, and its termination, if to be speedy and painless, has already been more desired than dreaded.” He added: “I cannot die too soon.” The time had come, he decided, to end his own life. 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!”

I was struck also by the candor with which certain nineteenth-century actors described their digestive travails, like James Henry Hammond’s descriptions of his lifelong battle with what he called dyspepsia, and Gen. Winfield Scott’s crippling bouts of intestinal unrest.