Only a master storyteller like Erik Larson could turn the five tumultuous months leading up to the Civil War into “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroes at the Dawn of the Civil War” (Crown), a compelling, page-turning read, chock full of anecdotes, psychological profiles and obscure but compelling tidbits of history all set against a relentless march towards a conflict that would kill over 620,000 soldiers and devastate a nation.
Larson, the author of six New York Times bestsellers whose previous works include “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” about a mass murderer and the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair, writes in a novelistic style that makes history come alive. He does so through his ability to weave together the familiar facts of history with information that can only be gleaned through relentless and extensive research.
Yes, most of us know that the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter, which was located in Charleston Harbor and under the command of U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson. But did you know that Anderson had owned enslaved people and was a defender of slavery? That Lincoln often misspelled Sumter as Sumpter? Or, more importantly, South Carolina did not have to succeed because of Lincoln’s election, as he had no intention of outlawing slavery in the Southern states?
“When I started out doing this, one concern I had was that the Civil War has not exactly been underwritten,” Larson told me during a phone conversation earlier this week, noting that a quick Google indicated around 65,000. “I had vowed over the years never ever to write about the Civil War.”
That changed when, as he was looking for the topic of his next book and watching the events of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he began to consider the deep divide and unrest of our own times.
Faced with what he describes as an intimidating world of previous scholarship, Larson says “What I really wanted to do was to provide a rich sense, on an intimate level, of what the forces were and the motivations for the start of the Civil War.”
The magic of his writing is that he accomplishes this by immersing the reader in details, descriptions, and personalities mostly unknown to many of us, including “eight typical characters” such as Charleston society doyenne Mary Boykin Chestnut, who kept a detailed diary, and James Henry Hammond, a Charleston planter who was a leader of the secessionist movement and who later became a U.S. senator despite public knowledge of his sexual relationships with four nieces ages 13 to 19.
He also includes information about resolving issues regarding dueling, from “The Code of Honor or Rules for the Government Principals and Seconds in Dueling” and instructions for the “proper” way of whipping slaves as well as the going prices for selling human beings.
The Southern mindset among the owners of enslaved people of the time is best summed up in a letter written to President James Buchanan, president before Lincoln, by Arthur Peronneau Hayne, a U.S. senator from Charleston. In it, he writes that without slavery “our every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, made unhappy — education, the light of knowledge — all lost and our people ruined forever. “
“White southerners had persuaded themselves that slavery was a good thing for all concerned, especially for the enslaved blacks,” said Larson. He also notes that many of these same men were devoted readers of writers like Sir Walter Scott, author of “Ivanhoe,” and believed fervently in honor and the code of chivalry.
As outrageous and hypocritical as that seems today, Larson says when writing about a different era it’s important to consider the point of view of those times to accurately reflect how events unfolded.
“It gives a better sense of what the forces were that did lead to states like South Carolina succeeding from the Union and the Civil War,” he said, noting that understanding is not condoning, but historic context provides a lesson for the present and future as we struggle with political division today.
This article previously appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
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