"The Demon of Unrest," Erik Larson

 Any book by Erik Larson is worth reading. This one is especially appropriate for Memorial Day. Like most of you, I have read many books about Lincoln and the Civil War, starting with Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, The Prairie Years and the War Years when I was around fifteen. A quick Google search suggests that about 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War and another 16,000 about Lincoln – more than a book a day for 159 years, far more books than one could read in a lifetime.

 

Nevertheless, this is one to be read, as it concerns just the five months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration. During those early months, any bet that slavery would be abolished and the Union preserved would have been a risky proposition.

 

Enjoy Memorial Day, and think of all those who sacrificed that we might live freely. It is our day of remembrance.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson

May 27, 2024

 

“I began working on this book in early 2020 during the first weeks of the

COVID pandemic…Political unrest had heightened the chaos of the pandemic,

and for whatever reason I began wondering: Exactly how did the Civil War begin?”

                                                                                                                                The Demon of Unrest, 2024

                                                                                                                                “Sources and Acknowledgements”

                                                                                                                                Erik Larson (1954-)

 

In May 2020, I wrote a brief essay on Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile. I have read others of his books, but that was before I began writing these short essays of books enjoyed.

 

While Mr. Larson began writing this book in early 2020, in “A Note to the Reader,” he writes of the events of January 6, 2021: “I was appalled by the attack, but also riveted.” He notes that the “anger, anxiety and astonishment” he felt then would have been experienced by many Americans in the five months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration. It was, but far more polarizing in 1860 than today, or in 1968.

 

More than anything, the Civil War was our nation’s “Rite of Passage.” The war tested, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg in November 1863, whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the idea that all men were equal – but in a nation in which 12.5% of the population were enslaved – could endure? With slavery integral to the south’s economy and a fixture of its social life, it could not, or not as it was. The attack by South Carolina’s militia on Fort Sumter in Charlestown Harbor provided the spark. But war was inevitable.

 

Slavery was the issue. The economy of the south was agricultural-based, while that of the north was industrial, manufacturing and commercial. Where northern merchants invested in factories and machinery, southern planters invested in land and slaves. According to the 1860 census there were four million slaves, the values of whom varied, but averaged around $400.00 each. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cotton was the United States’s most important product in 1860. By 1900 it was seventh. 

 

Larson’s story centers around Fort Sumter, which sits at the entrance to Charleston’s harbor, and Major Robert Anderson who was in charge. Charleston had been the fifth largest city in 1800, but by 1860 it ranked 22^nd. South Carolina, the first state to withdraw from the Union upon Lincoln’s election, was home, we are told to 440 planters who owned 100 or more slaves each. Charleston, with Fort Sumter guarding its harbor, was a central hub of the domestic slave trade. Centering his story around Sumter and the other rebel-occupied forts in Charleston’s harbor, Mr. Larson provides an almost daily diary of events, as tensions increased, states debated secession, and the inevitability of war drew near. 

 

While Lincoln, William Seward, Winfield Scott, and James Buchanan play supporting roles, the main players, apart from Major Anderson and his officers, are southern planters and politicians – including the despicable James Hammond, the peripatetic Edmund Ruffin, the ambitious Mary Chestnut – and one reporter, the curious and thoughtful British journalist William Howard Russell. 

 

Lively written, with punchy sentences and short chapters, Mr. Larson quotes from letters, diaries, newspapers and histories. In answer to the question posed in the rubric, the reader learns that any similarities between today’s extremists and the South’s secessionists in 1860 are far less than their differences.