The Demon of Unrest Is Marred by Comparison of Jan. 6 to Attack on Fort Sumter
By Erik Larson
(Crown, 592 pages, $35)
The saga of Fort Sumter in the lead-up to the American Civil War is familiar territory for historians. Erik Larson, the acclaimed author of In the Garden of Beasts and The Splendid and the Vile, provides a fast-paced narrative of the time period between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the “first shots” of the Civil War in Charleston’s harbor in April 1861, in his new book, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. But Larson’s book is marred by its introduction, where he compares the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to the assault on Fort Sumter, and by his selective bibliography, which excludes the two best descriptions of the immediate origins of the Civil War: Shelby Foote’s brilliant narrative of those events in his masterful trilogy of the Civil War, and Richard Current’s indispensable Lincoln and the First Shot.
The notion that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were comparable to the shelling of Fort Sumter, the latter of which resulted in a war that produced more than 700,000 American deaths, is ridiculous. Here, Larson is magnifying both the events and consequences of Jan. 6, which corresponds, however, to the political narrative pushed by one side in the current political battles in our country.
And it is curious that Larson apparently failed to consult either Foote’s or Current’s narratives of the attack on Fort Sumter. Neither author is mentioned in his “Sources and Acknowledgments” nor in his bibliography. Perhaps that is because both Foote and Current concluded that Lincoln deftly maneuvered the Confederacy to fire the first shot of the war. Neither Foote or Current absolved Jefferson Davis, the “fire eaters” of secession, and the Confederate commanders in South Carolina of responsibility for starting the most deadly war in American history. But Lincoln knew what he was doing by informing South Carolina authorities that he was going to reprovision Sumter but not militarily reinforce the fort. If there was going to be a war, Lincoln wanted the Confederates to fire the first shot. After all, in his inaugural address, Lincoln told the secessionists, “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.” Indeed, three months after the attack on Sumter, a friend of Lincoln recorded in his diary that Lincoln told him that he “himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without attempting to reinforce, giving notice of the fact to Gov. Pickins [sic] of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter — it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.”
Richard Current shied away from accusing Lincoln of deliberately provoking the attack on Sumter, but he concluded that Lincoln likely thought that hostilities would result from his announced attempt to re-provision the fort and “he was determined that, if they should … they must clearly be initiated by the Confederates.” Similarly, Shelby Foote wrote that Lincoln shrewdly maneuvered Confederate leaders into a Hobson’s choice of either “back[ing] down on their threats or else to fire the first shots of the war.” Larson has literally nothing to say on this topic. Instead, Larson’s focus is on the South Carolina aristocrats — the planter, slaveholder class — that fell prey to a “demon of unrest” that propelled the country to civil war. They called themselves “the chivalry,” and Larson writes that they “retreated into [their] own world of indolence and myth.” These were men like Robert Rhett, Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, David Jamison, and James Chestnut (diarist Mary Chestnut’s husband). To them, slavery was a positive good, and they feared that a Lincoln presidency would lead to slave rebellions that would bring ruin upon the South’s “peculiar institution.”
Larson shows how that “demon of unrest” was allowed to grow by the ineffectual response to secession by lame duck President James Buchanan. This, too, is a familiar story. Buchanan sympathized with the South, and while he refused to surrender to Confederate demands to abandon Sumter, he did nothing to strengthen the North’s position there. Buchanan simply waited on events in the hope that the new president would deal with the growing crisis. Lincoln, on the other hand, was frustrated as he observed the Union falling apart without any means to do anything as president-elect.
Larson’s narrative is mostly chronological, highlighting in short, crisply written chapters the major events leading up to the attack on Sumter. The political chasm between North and South, Larson believes, was unbridgeable, yet he portrays Lincoln as being bewildered that Southern sentiments were so pro-secession. Why, then, did Lincoln say shortly before leaving for Washington that he faced a task “more difficult” than that faced by General Washington? Other federal forts and property had been taken over by Confederate forces, so what was so special about Sumter? Why did Lincoln make a “stand” there? South Carolina — Charleston in particular — was the “cradle of secession,” the state that was driving all the others toward disunion.
Lincoln received advice both from military leaders (including Gen. Winfield Scott) and Cabinet officials (including Secretary of State William Seward) to abandon Sumter because it was indefensible. In fact, unbeknownst to Lincoln, Seward and presidential envoy Ward Lamon told Confederate officials that Sumter would be evacuated, and when it wasn’t, those Confederate officials who had deferred attacking the fort based on those representations, felt that Lincoln had deceived them. In reality, Lincoln had already launched plans to reprovision the fort.
Why did it matter to Lincoln who fired the first shot? Lincoln had been a chief critic of President James Polk’s provocative efforts to start a war with Mexico in the mid-1840s. He viewed Polk as the aggressor in that war. Richard Current believed Lincoln was determined to maneuver the South to be the aggressor. In doing so, Lincoln also ensured that sufficient men would volunteer to fight to preserve the Union. As Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
Larson’s epilogue fast forwards to the Union recapture of Fort Sumter in April 1865. General Robert Anderson, who as a major commanded Sumter during the original crisis, was on hand on April 14 to once again raise the Stars and Stripes over the fort he had surrendered exactly four years before. Anderson, a Kentuckian and former slaveholder himself, is one of the heroes of Larson’s narrative for his courageous defense of Sumter and his loyalty to the Union. That evening at dinner at the Charleston Hotel, Gen. Anderson made a toast to “the good, the great, the honest man, Abraham Lincoln.” Ironically, that same evening at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., Lincoln lay dying from a gunshot wound. The last gasp of the “demon of unrest.”
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