LARSON IS THE author of a number of critically acclaimed nonfiction books, including The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (2003) and The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020). His latest, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War (Crown) was released in April. We recently interviewed Larson about how he came to the subject and, in writing the book, what he learned about the Civil War.
Q: Over the years, you’ve written about a wide variety of historical personalities and events, including the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany, William E. Dodd, and the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I. When and why did you decide to turn your attention to the Civil War—and, in particular, to the five-month period between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the firing on Fort Sumter?
The pandemic had a lot to do with it. In mid-March 2020 I was halfway through the book tour for my Churchill saga, The Splendid and the Vile, when the world shut down. My wife and I retreated to our pandemic redoubt where suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands. I decided to start looking for my next project, and began reading into a variety of subjects. One salient aspect of that early pandemic period was heightened political discord, which drove some on America’s fringes to mutter darkly about civil war and secession, and for no particular reason, I began wondering just how did the Civil War begin?
I knew about Fort Sumter, of course, but only in a timeline way, so I started wandering through various digital repositories of Civil War materials. I stumbled across The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, with its hundreds of letters, telegrams, and reports, all arranged in exquisite chronological order. I was fascinated. As I read, I felt an accretion of dread and suspense conjured solely by the documents, which captured in detail—amazing detail—the inexorable descent toward war.
The question then was could I say anything new, or at least tell the story in a fresh way. I was particularly interested in the human traits of the various actors that helped drive the crisis, namely hubris, ambition, ego, false honor, and the need on the part of some characters for personal affirmation. Similarly, I was struck by the patina of politesse in the communications between Major Robert Anderson and General P.G.T. Beauregard, who both claimed to be friends—never mind that Beauregard was plotting the slaughter of Anderson and his men.
I began to feel that maybe the time had come to bring the story of Sumter back to life. And then came the events of January 6, 2021. The mayhem of that day convinced me beyond my last lingering doubt that this was not just a dusty old story from the distant past, but one that had a powerful resonance today.
Q: Early in The Demon of Unrest, you write, “At the heart of the story is a mystery that still confounds: How on earth did South Carolina, a primitive, scantily populated state in economic decline, become the fulcrum for America’s greatest tragedy?” What have you come to understand is the answer?
It’s difficult to isolate any one force, but I became convinced that one very important aspect was the exaggerated sense of honor evinced by “the chivalry” of South Carolina. Yes, this is how they labeled themselves: the chivalry. By the late antebellum period the so-called pro-slavery evangelists had managed to convince planters that slavery was a positive good and that slave ownership was an honorable thing. At the same time, the North and the rest of the world were moving in the opposite direction, condemning slavery as an unalloyed evil and, in so doing, telling the chivalry that they too were evil, thereby abrading their sense of personal honor. Add to this a foundational fear among slaveowners in South Carolina and elsewhere that increasingly heated abolitionist rhetoric threatened to drive the enslaved men and women in their midst to rise up and destroy them—a fear of course given concrete form with John Brown’s raid of October 1859.
Finally, South Carolina was a state historically acknowledged as a fount of rebellious attitudes and persnickety behavior. As one lonely Carolina Unionist put it, the state was like “an old woman who has been engaged in scolding all her life until at last she works herself up into a fit of hysterics and thus has all kinds of fantasies and imaginations … and like a wild cat is ready to fly at any person who looks at her.”
Q: The book is populated by a diverse cast of individuals, including politicians, military officers, journalists, and southern civilians. Of them all, is there one whose story you found especially important or unusually interesting?
One of the most compelling is Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter and pro-slavery radical. He embodies the forces that coalesced to make the Civil War happen, including in his case his personal ambition and his need for self-affirmation. One of my goals with this book was to try to isolate the moment when southerners and northerners began to imagine the wholesale killing of one another. Ruffin achieved this milestone early on and became a bloodthirsty proponent of civil war. He also happened to fire the first combat shot of the war, after the initial signal mortar round was launched. Especially chilling was his craving for bloodshed at the First Battle of Manassas, where he fired a cannon into the backs of retreating Union men, and then expressed his disappointment at not killing more than he did. His narrative arc was very much the arc the South.
Q: How would you describe your research process? What sources did you find particularly illuminating?
For this book, my process was necessarily different than for my others. Again, the pandemic was to blame. Ordinarily, once I think I’ve found an idea, the next step is to parachute into an archive and see what’s available, to determine whether there is enough fine-grained material to make a narrative approach feasible. For Demon, however, I had to rely at first on digital collections because the archives I most needed were initially closed. Happily, the Library of Congress has many rich digital collections from the era, including the papers of Abraham Lincoln; Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander; and James Henry Hammond, a leading pro-slavery evangelist. And of course there was that compendium of official records.
Once I’ve committed to an idea I try to immerse myself as deeply as possible in the subject, to see what’s already been done and what’s been overlooked. When archives began reopening, I finally dove in—first the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, God’s gift to researchers, then the Charleston Historical Society. There are of course some brilliant databases available on Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and such, and these were very helpful, especially since the best of them are readily searchable via computer.
Generally—and this may sound strange—I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it. What most appeals to me are the little details that can light a reader’s imagination. For example, the fact that vultures helped clean the streets of antebellum Charleston, and that travelers from the North were struck by the roar of insects during summer nights in the Lowcountry. I loved too learning from a British war correspondent’s diary that the residues of chewing tobacco were a noxious presence everywhere, including the hallways of fine hotels.
Q: What if anything new did you learn about this critical period in American history?
Well, it was all new to me. I came to this era as an ingenue. I knew the basics, but I’d never had much interest in the Civil War. One very important benefit of this approach is that I saw everything with a fresh eye. My audience is not the many amateur and professional Civil War historians of America, but rather readers like me, who perhaps are coming to the book with the expectation that maybe they’ll get a good, compelling story. If I bring anything new to the party, it’s a rich expression of what it might have been like to have been alive in 1860–1861 and to have experienced firsthand that terrible, inexorable slide toward catastrophe.
Q: Can you sum up in a sentence what you hope readers will take away from The Demon of Unrest?
My hope is that readers will suspend their knowledge of what happened in 1860–1861, and fall back into the past so deeply that they’ll find themselves hoping the Civil War won’t occur, the way I always feel when I reread Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the start of World War I. But I’m also hoping, given the anxious and politically fraught time we live in, that people pause a moment and realize that all this idle chatter about civil war and secession that we hear so often is something to be taken seriously. The inconceivable is always conceivable to someone.
Q: What’s next for you? Any plans to focus again on the Civil War era?
I have no plans for another book about the Civil War, though many very compelling stories did beckon to me along the way, and one continues to tempt me. Right now, though, I’m contemplating a return to the Gilded Age, my favorite period in history, but that’s as much as I’ll say!
