Daniel Suhr: Before the fall of Fort Sumter

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: WORLD Opinions commentator Daniel Suhr recommends a new book of “suspenseful” nonfiction on the Civil War.

DANIEL SUHR: In Erik Larson’s new book The Demon of Unrest, the bestselling author describes his process of writing. First, he discovers an “inherently suspenseful” true story and then he treats that story like a Christmas tree, “finding and hanging the shiny ornaments, the revealing details hidden deep within archives, diaries, and memoirs.” Larson previously wrote one book dealing with true crime at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair. In 2011, he published another on the Nazis in Berlin before World War II. This time he writes about America’s descent into civil war in 1861, focusing on the six months before the fall of South Carolina’s Fort Sumter.

In short, punchy chapters, Larson tells of a former congressman from Illinois named Abe Lincoln. He also writes about a wild-eyed secessionist named Edmund Ruffin and a philandering U.S. senator from South Carolina named James Henry Hammond.

When Lincoln is elected president in November 1860, he does not take office until March 1861. Eventually, Lincoln begins his train journey eastward to his inauguration, with Pinkerton detectives to protect him from rumored assassins. The bodyguards can’t allay Lincoln’s other fear: that he and his team are not up to the job. As Lincoln settles into Washington, Jefferson Davis and other Confederates are launching their new government. For both, the question of Fort Sumter looms large: Would the federal government resupply the besieged base? Would the Confederates force the issue by firing the first shots?

As Lincoln vacillates, we see the men inside the island redoubt hold their own through privation and isolation. Meanwhile, for Confederate leaders, “Fort Sumter was an evil that had to be dealt with, and quickly.” Larson has a strong subtext about the South’s addiction to notions of chivalry and dignity. He notes the North’s “naivete about the crisis and in particular about the power of honor in shaping Southern attitudes.”

The crisis reaches a head in April 1861 when Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard attacks and overmore three thousand mortar shells and cannonballs rain down on the fort. Surprisingly, though the fort falls into Confederate hands, there’s not one casualty among the hundredeighty or so federal troops who held her ramparts.

Throughout the book, Larson offers plenty of entertaining anecdotes–those “ornaments” he so treasures. For instance, one New York diarist denounced Lincoln’s lack of resolve this way: “The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers….” These gems from the archives are often matched by Larson’s own prose. Take this line: “Lincoln on a sofa was like a ship’s mast on a barstool, poised in an uneasy equilibrium between relaxation and structural collapse.”

When Lincoln’s inaugural train stopped in Tolono, Illinois, he told the crowd: “Let us believe, as some poet has expressed it: ‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’” The clouds of war would hang over America for four bloody years, and the skies stayed overcast for some years thereafter. But eventually the sunshine did break through, and today tourists visit Fort Sumter year round. They would be well served to read Larson’s book and fully appreciate the history of the place.

I’m Daniel Suhr.

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