Author Erik Larson presents onion layers of reasons that Americans eventually warred against one another, in his new book, “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.”
Delving Into Details
As he has with other noteworthy books, including “The Devil in the White City” (about the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893) and “The Splendid and the Vile” (about Winston Churchill and the London blitz), Larson finds mesmerizing needles in haystacks through extensive research, revealing obscure but historically substantial people, places, and events.While readers may wonder why a few early chapters delve into the life of planter James Hammond, they'll eventually learn the connection to the events that unfolded in the early morning of April 12, 1861, when Confederate troops fired upon Union-occupied Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor.
Avid readers of Civil War history may not recognize the name David Dixon Porter, but Larson shows us that Porter was one of the first people to hear—from Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, no less—that South Carolina had seceded from the Union. The man who would become a U.S. Navy admiral had walked into the home of then-Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis for a party on the evening of Dec. 20, 1860, and found everyone exuberant with the news.
Although Larson backtracks to provide information preceding the political powder keg of November 1860, he primarily provides insight into the minutia of individual days and weeks leading to April 12.
Readers are taken to Washington and down to South Carolina and back to the nation’s capital time and again—all while being introduced to a bevy of interesting figures and facts. For instance, New York Congressman Charles H. Van Wyck was stabbed on Feb. 22, 1861 near the U.S. Capitol because he spoke out against slavery and secession.
Larson focuses on the food scarcity at Fort Sumter while Union soldiers sought to guard it against Confederate aggression. “At our meals some officers haul out of their pockets crumbs and pieces of crackers,” wrote a man assigned to the fort. “One cracker to a man morning and night—none at dinner.”
In his initial note to readers, Larson extends an invitation to “step into the past … as if you were living in that day and did not know how the story would end.” Indeed, “The Demon of Unrest” intensifies his account with such fascinating facts that by the time Confederate batteries begin firing on Fort Sumter at 4:30 a.m., April 12, we are there in the tense darkness with Maj. Robert Anderson and his 80-plus soldiers.
While the book’s last chapter conveys a jubilant South, it also tells of a president reflecting on the days before the Civil War: “Of all the trials I have had since I came here, none began to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
