Lorna's Reviews > The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

”I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration.”

—— Erik Larson, Dark Magic (A Note to Readers)

Erik Larson is a master storyteller and this masterful examination into the run-up before the Civil War and the six months between the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, the inauguration in Washington, and the surrender of Fort Sumter. In the election of November 1860, the country was bitterly at odds with the Southern extremists moving closer to destroying the Union with one state after another electing to secede from the Union with Lincoln powerless to stop them. The Demon of Unrest focuses on Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the forts in Charleston Harbor as the passions of the North and the South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor, that of Fort Sumpter.

At the heart of this riveting narrative was Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumpter. Anderson was a former slave owner and sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union. Larson also focuses on a radical Edmund Ruffin stirring secessionist rhetoric,and Mary Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter and conflicted about both marriage and slavery, most importantly, she kept a diary. In the middle of it all was the overwhelmed Abraham Lincoln as he tries to avert a war that he fears is inevitable. As always, there is extensive research in this book as Larson utilizes diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers and plantation records. It is the harrowing story of the nation’s forces that led America to the brink. One cannot read this book without seeing the harrowing and shocking similarities of the polarity in our nation today to the era of the Civil War.