← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Erik Larson's New Civil War History
00:33:18
Historian Erik Larson discusses his latest book, 'The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.'
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Best selling author and historian Eric Larson decided long ago that he would never write a book about the Civil War. That all changed in the wake of January 6, when he saw the parallels between our own election crisis and the unrest the country experienced in the lead up to Abraham Lincoln's inauguration. He couldn't ignore the call to write about this turbulent period. The book is titled the Demon of A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. It vividly recounts the tense days between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the firing on Fort Sumter that marked the beginning of the Civil War. Throughout the book, Erik Larson brings these historical figures to life, from Lincoln to President James Buchanan to a Confederate diarist named Mary Chestnut, to a staunch secessionist named Edmund Ruffin. He also makes the case that there is no doubt that slavery was the true issue at the center of the war, not states rights. We were thrilled that Eric Larson was our September get lit with all of it book club author. He joined us on Monday for a sold out event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. I began our conversation by asking Erik Larson how he decided to write about this particular period of history.
- [01:30]
Eric Larson
The reason this came about. First of all, I am on record as having said numerous times, you can google this, that I would never ever write about the Civil War and that I would never write about Abraham Lincoln. Came the pandemic. I was in the midst of my book tour from my previous book, the Splendid and the Vile. It was cut short, cut in half by the pandemic. Lockdown. March 12, my wife's birthday. I'm on my way home, find myself with a whole lot. At least I was home for a birthday, find myself with a lot more time on my hands than I had expected to have. And I started thinking about ideas for what would be my next project. As you recall, there was a good deal of political discord then as now, and people were actually talking about secession and a modern civil war at the time, as they are, as they are rather foolishly today. And so I just found myself thinking, well, how did the Civil War actually get started? I had only a high school timeline perception of the Civil War. I mean, I've read some books about it, but I'm not a Civil War buff, never was. And so I just thought how did that start? And often that's often how I leap into one of my books is just a question. Now my ordinary MO would have been to Jump into an archive without even telling the archivist that I was gonna come and just see what kind of material was available. Couldn't do it. Pandemic. Didn't wanna do it. Even if the archives had been open, I would not wanna have gone there. But I found this set of documents online and suddenly got a bound volume of it called the War of the Rebellion. Compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. How's that for a recollection? And I started reading this thing and it just was. I mean, this is hundreds of documents in scrupulous chronological order. Telegram, response, letter, response, response, response, chronicling this ascent or descent. However I want to look at it. Intention and suspense toward the start of the Civil War. And I thought, wow, gosh, my job is half done because of this. And so I started thinking about it in a more serious way. But I was still kind of wandering in the wilderness looking for the next idea until January 6, 2021, sitting in my office, watching this thing unfold, feeling that rush of emotions that I'm sure we all felt, you know, anxiety, fear, anger and so forth. And realizing that back in 1861, this is what people must have been feeling in America on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. And if I could somehow try to capture that power of that moment, that maybe this would be a very worthy thing to do, that it was a story for our time, not just something from the past. Longer answer than you wanted.
- [04:25]
Alison Stewart
That was a great answer. Have you been to Fort Sumter?
- [04:28]
Eric Larson
Yes, I've been to Fort Sumter.
- [04:29]
Alison Stewart
How did it change for you after writing this book?
- [04:34]
Eric Larson
So I have to say that Fort Sumter was a very disappointing experience because the Union destroyed Fort Sumter in 1863 in a prolonged bombardment that basically turned it into a pile of pulverized brick. And there has not been that much that was done to try to bring it back to what it was in 1860-61, which was a 50 foot tall sea fortress with three tiers of guns. Now it's basically one tier of fairly modern weapons because of a World War II fortress and so forth. But what it did do for me was that standing there on the one promontory within the fort, I was able to get a sense of how close the opposing artillery was by the time of the Sumter bombardment. I mean, these guys in this fort, 75 men, plus their commander, Major Robert Anderson, these guys were surrounded by heavy artillery manned by people who had one thought in mind when this bombardment began, which was to kill Major Anderson and His men, and they had no food, they had no prospect of supplies.
- [05:48]
Alison Stewart
And there they were, as you said, you got. You were motivated by January 6th. What events surrounding Lincoln's election and our inauguration, what did it reveal to you about the vulnerabilities of our electoral system?
- [06:10]
Eric Larson
So what was so interesting to me was that the two moments of gravest national concern in 1861, before the Civil War actually started, where would the electoral count come off as planned and as the Constitution requires? And would the new president, Abraham Lincoln, would he actually be inaugurated or would something awful happen before he got to that point? The electoral count was really interesting because they handled it very differently back in 1861. I say they. This is due to General Winfield Scott, who was America's commanding general back in this period. This guy was 6 foot 4. He weighed about 350 pounds. He had every conceivable ailment that somebody could have. He was really on his. He barely had legs. He was on his last legs. And he kept his feet in an ice bath day after day. But this man was absolutely loyal to the United States of America. And he vowed that this electoral count was going to happen come hell or high water. He filled Washington troops with cavalry, with cannon, and he made the specific vow that if anybody tried to disrupt the electoral count, he was going strap that person to the front of a cannon and blow him into the hills of Arlington, Virginia. The term he used was, I will manure the hills of Arlington, Virginia with his body. And so the electoral count came off. I mean, it was surprise, surprise. Although there was an attempt by disgruntled Southern leaning people to try to get into the Capitol, but they were repelled readily because of this disarmed force.
- [07:54]
Alison Stewart
You've written about such giants, Winston Churchill, Lincoln. How do you write about these giants and make them seem real?
- [08:04]
Eric Larson
Well, so, yeah, this goes back to, like, Churchill. When I did my book Splendid and the Vile, about Churchill and the Blitz, you know, I sat down for breakfast with the head of the International Churchill Society, and it was basically all he could do to keep from asking me, what the hell do you think you're doing? You know, here you are just coming out of the blue, trying to write about Churchill. And I said to him, as I said more recently to someone down in Charleston about the Civil War. I said, well, you know, it's all in the telling. You know, it's all how you tell a story. And if you tell it right, people will suspend what they know, what they think they know about a particular event, and will Allow themselves to fall back into tongues and get caught up in the story. So that was my take. Having said that. Having said that, I would say that I probably should have stuck to my vow never to write about the Civil War and I will never write about it again.
- [09:08]
Alison Stewart
What do you understand about Lincoln as a person after writing this?
- [09:13]
Eric Larson
Okay, so Lincoln. I'm sufficiently arrogant that I decided, okay, there's this whole hagiography of Lincoln. Everybody loves, loves Lincoln. And that always makes me very. Brings out the contrary in me. My attitude with this book was, all right, Abe, prove it to me. Show me what you got right. And he did. He did. I mean, I really came to love Abraham Lincoln in a way that I have not loved other characters because of his humanity, his warmth, his integrity, the quality of his thought. I mean, I don't know that there was an unoriginal phrase that he wrote in his correspondence or in his speeches, but what a especially endeared me to Lincoln were two things. One, he couldn't spell. He could not spell the word inauguration. Could not spell the word inauguration, and he could not spell Fort Sumter. He kept adding a P. Sumpter. There is no P in sumter. But the other thing that really endeared me to him was that he and Mary Todd, before they set out from Springfield, Illinois to Washington for the inauguration, they had a yard sale. They did. They had a yard sale. Have the receipt. They had a yard sale. And because they wanted to sell a lot of their goods so that they could actually help pay for this trip from Springfield to Washington so he could be inaugurated as President of the United States. So I fell for him.
- [10:37]
Alison Stewart
Why did you add that detail about him not being a good speller?
- [10:41]
Eric Larson
Oh, my God, how could I not? I mean. I mean, see, this is probably a flaw in how I think about things, but, you know, it actually cuts to why I don't researchers when I do my research, because I'm looking for these things. If I go into an archive. This may sound strange, but I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it, until I see it and I recognize it. And as soon as I came across that yard sale, I was like, okay, this will go in the book. Sure it is. And the same thing about the misspellings and so forth.
- [11:18]
Alison Stewart
It seems pretty clear that Lincoln did not set out to abolish slavery.
- [11:22]
Eric Larson
Right. Clear to us.
- [11:24]
Alison Stewart
Clear to us. Yes. Why did so many Southerners believe that he was going to do it?
- [11:29]
Eric Larson
Well, you know, we talk about echo chambers today. This is sort of another similarity in the past to the present. Lincoln was very clear in the run up to his inauguration that he had no intention of abolishing slavery, that he would respect slavery in those states where it existed. He even went so far as to say that he would support the fugitive slave slave act, which was anathema to northern abolitionists. The fugitive slave act essentially allowed planters to come north with impunity to seize escaped slaves and bring them back down to the south. Lincoln made very clear that these were his views. He was very frustrated that people in the south did not get it. In the south, southerners, the prevailing view was that Lincoln was essentially the antichrist, that he had one goal, and that one goal was to abolish slavery. Now, what Lincoln did not really grasp initially Was that for southerners, the abolition of slavery would have been an existential disaster. Their entire capital structure of the south was based on the enslavement of black human beings. And Lincoln did not really get that this was this absolutely existential thing for the southerners. So they went off into their own little world deciding, okay, all he wants to do is abolish slavery. That's all he wants to do. And despite Lincoln's protestations to the contract, that's how they felt.
- [13:01]
Alison Stewart
It was interesting, your description of southerners, because you used the words chivalry and loyalty. Chivalry and loyalty. What did loyalty mean to a southerner?
- [13:10]
Eric Larson
Well, loyalty certainly didn't mean anything with regard to loyalty to the United States. Chivalry was the interesting thing to me at first. So southern planters believe themselves to be this exalted, almost knights of the round table kind of crowd. And they literally referred to themselves as the chivalry, the chivalry with a heightened sense of hospitality and manners and so forth, and sort of acting almost as this part. And when I first read one planter referring to himself and his friends as the chivalry, I thought this must be an aberration. But it was not. They refer to themselves as the chivalry, so much so that they held what were called rings tournaments, where southerners, southern planters, their sons themselves, they would dress up as their favorite knights from medieval era, get on a horse with a lance. They didn't do this to each other. They didn't want to kill each other, but they would race down a course, spearing rings hanging from above the course, this being a demonstration of their horsemanship, the ability to pierce these rings. If it was a rings and heads tournament, then at the very end of the course, there was an inanimate figure. They would draw out their saber and hack this thing to bits. This is the chivalry. This is how they believed. Not everybody, of course, but a certain subset.
- [14:41]
Alison Stewart
How did the idea of chivalry fit in with slavery?
- [14:44]
Eric Larson
That's a good question. But then they worked that out for themselves. Seriously, she raises a very important point there. There was, starting around 1800, even planters in South Carolina, in the slave owning states, felt that slavery was what they referred to as a necessary evil. But as the world advanced, as Britain led the in the abolition of slavery, and the north became more and more energetically abolitionist, in the south, the attitude changed because they owned enslaved people. These were people who gave them their livelihood and their culture. If that was a bad thing, then they were bad. And so there arose something called the pro slavery movement, which is a very powerful movement in the 1800s, the antebellum period, where southerners, white Southern planters, and others managed to convince themselves that slavery was the best of all possible worlds for themselves, but also for the enslaved blacks. Because, look, you know, three meals a day, they were not subject to the vicissitudes of the economy. So what's liter? What's to complain? Never mind that one planter, who's one of my favorite villains in the book, has, in his manual for his overseers, he ends it with a segment on very precisely detailing how to whip an enslaved black slave.
- [16:29]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk about Mary Chestnut. You really were taken with her diary. She was the wife of James Chestnut, a Confederate politician and a soldier. What insights did she provide for you?
- [16:41]
Eric Larson
So Mary Chestnut was this really terrific, terrific diarist. Her voice as a writer was very contemporary. If somebody were to read an excerpt of Mary Chestnut's actual diary, there are a number of iterations of her diary, but the actual diary, her own actual prose. If somebody were to read an excerpt from that diary and you just closed your eyes, you would think it might be somebody from today, very contemporary observer. Very no filter, I guess, is the best way to put it. I mean, anybody who refers to a fellow fellow Confederate matron or socialite as a miscreant is also going in the book, as is the fact that she said this person was a miscreant. But I liked her observations about things. And also the fact that Mary Chestnut, despite growing up among slaves, despite owning slaves, Mary Chestnut was very conflicted about slavery. And I found that fascinating.
- [17:53]
Alison Stewart
Why was South Carolina such a hotbed?
- [17:57]
Eric Larson
South Carolina? This is one of the enduring. Well, it's not really a mystery, but, you know, South Carolina had always been a persnickety state, dating back to the, to the, to the early 19th century. Well, even before, I mean, throughout its history, honestly, since the crafting of the Constitution, South Carolina was always a thorn in everybody's side. And in fact, so much so that other states, as South Carolina barreled towards secession and other states actually were concerned that South Carolina would lead the way because it would have no credibility because South Carolina was always doing this kind of crazy stuff. And so it sort of was kind of an amplification of what South Carolina had always been.
- [18:49]
Alison Stewart
I want to talk about James Buchanan. This is my favorite part.
- [18:53]
Eric Larson
Okay.
- [18:53]
Alison Stewart
Okay, first of all, what do you see as Buchanan's role in ushering in the.
- [18:59]
Eric Larson
James Buchanan was a bachelor. This was a shocking thing to those who followed the electorate back in that era. And people on his side of the fence went to great lengths to make sure that was okay with people. In fact, one guy came up with the solution for how to resolve the mystery of this bachelor in the White House. And he said, James Buchanan is married to the Constitution, that's how able to do this. But the problem was that James Buchanan, James Buchanan, until he became president, showed every sign of being likely to be a fantastic President because he had excelled in every political job he had had before. Until the presidency, he becomes President, the nation is starting to fall apart. Halfway late in his term, but starting to fall apart. He does not want a war on his time. He wants anything but. And he will go to huge lengths to keep that happening. So you have James Buchanan in the White House basically doing nothing to stop this national crisis. At the same time you have Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois who has vowed to himself that he would not speak out on the national crisis until he was officially president after the inauguration on March 4th of 1861. Now he made his views known through friendly newspaper editors, through politic know of course how he spoke about his attitudes about slavery, but he too was trying to stay out of the fray. So basically you had this vacuum and Major Anderson, who's out there at this fort in Charleston harbor, this 50 foot tall sea fortress, is getting no direction from anybody, no, no direct direction as to how he should behave, what he should do, whether he should surrender, whether he shouldn't. The entire fate of America was in the hands of this poor guy, Major Robert Anderson, who by the way was southern born, a former slave owner, but was himself deeply loyal not to the United States, but to the United States Army. And so that was the setup before the bombardment.
- [21:23]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to my conversation with Eric Larson, author of the book the Demon of A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. It was our Get Lit with all of It September book club selection. We'll have more with Eric along with questions from our sold out audience after a quick break. This is ALL of it. You are listening to ALL of IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's continue the conversation with our Get Lit with all of it book club author for September, Eric Larson. We spent the month reading his new book, the Demon of A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 6363 of you were able to check out a copy and read along with us. We had a sold out crowd at our event and as always, our audience had some really great questions. We'll get to some of those in just a minute. But first let's dive back into my interview with Eric Larson. What was a decision that Anderson made during the course of the escalating situation that proved very consequential?
- [22:46]
Eric Larson
Well, he made many, but one was, I think what you're thinking of is when Major Anderson was put in charge of federal forces in Charleston harbor, he was put in charge of a number of fortifications, one of which was Sumter. One was Fort Moultrie, also a sea fortress but on a land based sea fortress. And it was still very much a full service, fully functioning fortress where Sumter actually was not yet that. So Major Anderson comes in, he's put in charge of this operation hated by every Charlestonian, every South Carolinian, South Carolina, December 20, 1860, decides that it's going to secede. Things get very dicey in Charleston harbor and Major Anderson decides on his own, he cooks up a plan to move his men, his 75 men who at this point are stationed at Fort Moultrie on land around Charleston Harbor. He cooks up a plan, a secret plan to move these men and their families to Fort Sumter, which was more or less believed to be impregnable at that point. He cooks up this plan. He's going to do it on Christmas Day, on Christmas, the evening of Christmas Day. He can't. The weather is too bad. He does it the evening of the next day, still counting on people to be distracted by the holiday, which is a huge holiday in the sacrifice. And by God, he pulls it off and he occupies Fort Sumter the next morning, the first indication to Charlestonians that something really bad has happened Overnight is that Fort Moultrie, this land based fortress? Smoke and fire are coming out of Fort Moultrie because Anderson has left behind a couple of officers and men to burn the gun carriages and spike the cannon. And so Charlestonians awake to see this fort on fire and to see this flag flying from Fort Sumter. And they were just. It's just like sticking a stick in a beehive.
- [24:45]
Alison Stewart
Before we leave, people, I want to talk about Edmund Ruffin. He's one of the secessionists you spend time with. What were his arguments for why the Southern states should leave the Union?
- [24:56]
Eric Larson
Well, Edmund Refn is my second villain. And Edmund Ruffin simply believed that, that the north was a tyrannical force out to subdue and crush southern aspirations. And there was nothing that anybody could do to convince him otherwise. He hated the north, he hated Yankees. He was a Virginian and he hated being a Virginian because Virginia was not doing anything about secession. So then he made it his mission to go around to other Southern states, to South Carolina in particular and stump for secession in all these places. And eventually he made himself kind of an unofficial South Carolinian. But he was. I loved him as a car. I love a good villain, but I loved him as a character because he was so rotten. He was just rotten, you know, he's just so rotten. He just hated the Yankees so much. And then, you know, I don't want to reveal certain details because there are, I mean, yes, we know what happened, but there are spoiler alerts, you know, about things that Ruffin does well. I definitely don't want to give away the ending, but he was a horrible guy. So.
- [26:09]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, one thing that was so clear is there was so much miscommunication. So much miscommunication. How did the invention of the telegram change the way that business and politics were conducted?
- [26:25]
Eric Larson
Yeah, so one of the sub themes of the whole story really was miscommunication. And it's interesting, mail was the primary means of communication and mail was when things were up and operating. Mail was actually surprisingly, surprisingly good. Surprisingly efficient means of communicating. But it was not immediate. The telegraph had come along and this was a magical thing. I mean, almost instantaneous transference of messages over great distances. But one fatal flaw of the telegraph was that it was a leaky system. At different nodes along the way, information could be passed on to somebody who wasn't supposed to have it. So the telegraph, for really hypersensitive stuff was not always used. So you relied on the main and so. And then the mail would cross, you know, you'd have one person saying one thing in the mail and something else coming back in the mail, and it was just really a mess.
- [27:29]
Alison Stewart
Do you think there's any scenario that would have avoided the Civil War?
- [27:36]
Eric Larson
You're asking me to engage in speculative history and something I really have said I would never engage in.
- [27:41]
Alison Stewart
You even write it in Civil War either.
- [27:43]
Eric Larson
So I'm going to stick with this one. But, you know, the thing is, the scholars, Civil War scholars, who have greater depth and grasp of this than I have tackled this same question, have not been able to come up with any persuasive scenario that would have avoided the Civil War. But one always has to ask, had there been a stronger president than Buchanan in office, what might the consequences have been had they been a stronger, more loyal president than Buchanan? But beyond that, I just can't. I can't say.
- [28:22]
Alison Stewart
Let's get to questions from the audience.
- [28:25]
Eric Larson
Thank you very much. I love the book. Thank you. Question.
- [28:28]
Alison Stewart
You can't put everything in the book. So what are one or two really good things that you kind of had to leave out?
- [28:36]
Eric Larson
How do you know that you can't put everything in a book? Okay, you know, that's a great question. And before we're done here, I may think of something. But believe me, I think all my favorite things are in this. All my favorite things are in this book. And if they're not in the book, they are in the footnotes. So. Yeah. However, now I have to address that also. When I gave this book to my editor starting out, I thought, okay, this is going to be sort of a historical suspense thriller. It's going to be be 250 pages max. By the time I turned it into my editor, it was 800 pages and she got it down to 500. So there must be something on the ground.
- [29:23]
Alison Stewart
If Lincoln hadn't mistakenly assigned the ship Powhatan to go to two separate locations at the same time.
- [29:34]
Eric Larson
What do you think the impact of that would have been, considering that.
- [29:37]
Alison Stewart
That Seward spent a lot of time undermining fixing it?
- [29:41]
Eric Larson
That was an interesting part of the story also. Well, if he had not made that error, if this particular warship had gone on the Sumter mission, would anything have changed My attitude? There is. I thought about that quite a bit also. My attitude is if that warship had gone with this relief expedition when it did, the war simply would have have broken out a lot sooner with a lot more casualties. Hi, I'd like to ask a question about how we have taught the causes of the Civil War in The United States. And I wonder if in your research, my understanding that may have changed over time a bit. And I wonder if you came across that in your research at all. Yeah, yeah. So what I found fascinating and hit me very, very early on, you know, at the start of the 20th century, historiography about the Civil War bent toward this concept of states rights. And, you know, that persisted for a lot longer than it actually should have. And one of the things that became very clear to me very early on, what I always try to do is I try to clear my head of whatever the sort of presumed history, the presumed themes and so forth, what the presumptions are that have, that have, you know, have gathered more cement, if you will, than they should have. And just sort of see for myself what's going on. And when you read into the actual documents of the, you know, the secession conventions and you read Mississippi's secession ordinance and other documents from this period, period, it's all about slavery. It is all about slavery. It is explicitly about slavery and how scholars let themselves get sidetracked into this whole states right back at the start of the 20th century, I have no idea, but it just leapt out at me.
- [31:47]
Alison Stewart
My final question for you. There seems to be a renewed interest in the Civil War. There was manhunt on Apple tv, plus there's oh, Mary on Broadway. Why do you think there's this renewed interest in the Civil War?
- [31:58]
Eric Larson
You know, well, maybe it's because of our contemporary political situation, but I also, I mean, I don't know that the interest has ever, ever, ever waned for a substantial period of time. It just always waxes and wanes and never goes away. You know, before I embarked on this, on this, on this book, when I was still wavering before January 6th convinced me that it was a very contemporary story, I asked my good friend Siri how many books had been written on the Civil War, and she said 60,000. Wow. But I came out, I wrote the.
- [32:34]
Alison Stewart
Book anyway, and it was great. Erik Larson, everybody. Thank you so much for your time today. That was my conversation with Eric Larson, author of the new book the Demon of Unrest, A saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. It was our September selection for our get lit with all of it book club. Up next, we'll speak with a folk duo who draw inspiration from this 19th century history in their songwriting and in their costumes. A special performance from Sons of Town hall is up next. Stay with us.
- [33:18]
Eric Larson
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship wnyc. Org.