“The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War” by Eric Larson

“The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War”

By Eric Larson

Crown, 2024

ISBN: 9780385348751

Rightly or wrongly one person can shape the direction of history. 

Eric Larson writes a fact-filled nonfiction book, “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War,” about the circumstances that led to America’s war between the North and the South. Two people stand out for their rhetoric extolling the virtues of slavery – the perfect life of chivalrous and honor bound citizens of the south, and a continuous pummeling of the citizenry pressing for separation from the United States and the hated Northern states that preached against slavery, Edmund Ruffin III and Mr. Hammond. “Cotton is King,” they swore, and without “African slaves” cotton could not prevail.

Over and over the ”voices” pressed for secession from the Union. Plantation owner Edmund Ruffin III, a man in need of affirmation, carried this message for decades, traveling throughout the South as a “fiery agent of disunion.” Scorned as a hate monger in his native state of Virginia he, nevertheless, planted the seed of division, attending state conventions and speaking often of secession from the Union. Maintaining slavery was essential to the lifestyle and economy of the plantation owners, and the North be damned. The messages of hate and the right of the States to govern their own affairs, and the virtue of slavery … a message carried throughout the south whenever people convened, was the seed planted that sprouted into the Civil War.

Larsen’s book focuses on the division led by the least populated and poorest state, South Carolina, on the federal Fort Sumter that protected Charleston, S.C. harbor and the city beyond.

As unrest over slavery grew, Sumter became a hated symbol to those opposed to slavery and the twisted human action, blinded by hate, that resulted in the war between the States.

This is a factual book of history, as told by writings between elected federal leaders, diaries and letters to family and friends of the hubris and misguided thinking that led to a four-year war and 750,000 of the nation’s young men dead. Larsen’s revelations are unsettling. The circumstances of the 1860s, too similar to today’s time of national division.

“The Demon of Unrest … ” listed on the New York Times book list, is an unsettling but important read. A reminder of the power of hate that can, over time, with a consistent message, mold public thought and direct history.

– Ellen Moyer