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

by Erik Larson

An Atlanta newspaper warned, “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South who does not boldly declare that he or she believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.”

Charleston seemed particularly inflamed. Announcements in two city newspapers called for the interrogation of every male citizen to “learn whether he is for us or against us in the conflict now waged by the North against our property and our rights.”

He found Congress seething with sectional malice; it took the House seven weeks to at last elect a speaker.

Southern fears. The address left William Seward baffled. “It shows conclusively that it is the duty of the President to execute the laws—unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a right to go out of the Union—unless it wants to.”

Porter, forty-seven, came from a prominent naval family and was wholly loyal to the Union but made a point of building friendships with leading men in Washington from both camps “to ascertain if there was any prospect of a peaceful termination of the difficulties between the North and South.”

“Because Sir my State has a deep interest in the decision.” This perplexed Buchanan. “How your state—what is it to Georgia whether a fort in Charleston harbor is abandoned?” “Sir,” Toombs answered, “the cause of Charleston is the cause of the South.” “Good God Mr. Toombs, do you mean that I am in the midst of a revolution?” “Yes Sir—more than that—you have been there for a year and have not yet found it out.”

She despised abolitionists, befriended slaveholders.

Dorothy dix

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,”

“Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the Liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right—The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a Law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive—giving half of the Frontier of a free Country to the curse of Slavery—these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.”

Construction of the monument had begun in 1848 with enslaved labor but ceased ten years later, just as America’s sectional crisis neared its peak, and would not resume until 1880. Owing to the use of a different marble upon resumption, the tower’s face would forever after have two tones, inadvertently immortalizing in stone America’s antebellum division.

Thoughtful observers found little to laugh at. A diarist identified only as “Public Man” wrote that “when we have reached a point at which an elected President of the United States consents to be smuggled through by night to the capital of the country, lest he should be murdered in one of the chief cities of the Union, who can blame the rest of the world for believing that we are a failure?”