Review: "The Demon of Unrest," Erik Larson

 By Paul Carrier

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, an island-based Union fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, which was the first state to secede following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Hours later, the fort’s garrison began to return fire, but Sumter fell to the rebels the following day.

Thus began the Civil War.

But what of the months leading up to that fateful day? That’s the primary focus of Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Larson, a best-selling author of historical nonfiction, chronicles the prelude  to the attack and the attack itself over the course of some 500 pages, and he does so with great clarity. The chapter headings list the location(s) and date(s) applicable to each chapter.

Larson’s account is both all-encompassing and remarkably individualistic. It features a detailed look at what happened on several fronts including the 1860 presidential election, the birth of the Confederacy, Lincoln’s inauguration, the travails of Sumter’s Union garrison, and the 1861 assault on the fort.

The Demon of Unrest includes revealing profiles of players on both sides of the saga. In fact, Larson’s greatest accomplishment may be his ability to lay out the nuts and bolts of what happened while simultaneously putting a very human face on the actors—Union and Confederate, male and female, military and political.

The key players come to life with their virtues and foibles on full display. As Larson points out in the novel’s acknowledgments, he loves digging up “the revealing details hidden deep within archives, diaries, and memoirs.”

When Lincoln, en route to his inauguration, stops in New York and studies the crowd outside the Astor House hotel,  for example, poet Walt Whitman is there to size him up. Whitman writes that he had a “capital view” of Lincoln, “his perfect composure and coolness; his unusual and uncouth height; his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on his head; dark-brown complexion; seamed and wrinkled yet canny-looking face; black, bushy head of hair; disproportionately long neck; and his hands held behind, as he stood observing the people.”

And Lincoln is but one character in a long and varied list.

There’s James Buchanan, Lincoln’s inept predecessor as president, who had Southern sympathies; Confederate diarist Mary Chestnut, whose writings can be quite acerbic; William Seward, Lincoln’s brilliant but scheming secretary of state; detective Allan Pinkerton, whose agency helped investigate an alleged pre-inaugural Confederate plot to seize Washington and kill Lincoln; tiny but fiery Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, a onetime U.S. congressman who eventually served as vice president of the Confederacy; and famed Irish-born war correspondent William Howard Russell.

The list goes on, and it is replete with surprises.

Major Robert Anderson, the Kentucky-born Union commander at Fort Sumter, owned slaves for a time and wrote before the war that his sympathies were “all with the South.” He was no great fan of the North or of abolitionists, but he was fiercely loyal to the U.S. Army.

Dorothea Dix, the earnest, Maine-born advocate for the mentally ill, was ardently committed to her work, but her compassion was highly selective. She “despised abolitionists” and “befriended slaveholders,” Larson writes.

Edmund Ruffin, a secessionist known as a “fire eater” because of his fanaticism, finally found the accolades he craved when he traveled to South Carolina to witness that state’s vote to secede in December 1860. At that point in time, he was viewed as a crank in his home state of Virginia, which had yet to break free from the Union.

Even Lincoln, arguably our greatest president, could be remarkably naive as the threat of secession bubbled and boiled in the South. Shortly after his election he suggested, privately, that the ongoing formation of militias in the slave states could be a good thing because they could be used to suppress secession. In fact, they served the opposite function.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all (and I won’t go into the details) is that the Union might have been able to retain Fort Sumter if not for heartbreaking mistakes and blinding cockiness.

Larson documents aspects of  Sumter’s saga that probably are unknown to most people. For example, during the months that passed between South Carolina's secession in December 1860 and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, a generally civil relationship prevailed between the Union garrison at Sumter and rebel leaders in Charleston. Similarly, after South Carolina seceded there was much uncertainty on both sides as to whether the Union would evacuate Sumter or try to supply and reinforce it.

Thanks to Larson’s exhaustive research (the book includes a bibliography and notes covering 45 pages of small print) The Demon of Unrest even offers humorous asides that lighten the mood, such as Stephens’ retort when a fellow Georgian said of the 100-pound man: “I could swallow him whole and never know the difference.”

“If you did,” Stephens replied, “there would be more brains in your belly than there ever will be in your head.”