The Demon of Unrest | Erik Larson | 2024
A typical American Civil War book suffers from multiple burdens. Many such books originate in academia, where authors feel obliged to get places, dates and casualty counts exactly right, sometimes at risk to their careers. In a typical textbook narrative, the reader is led from battle to battle with few philosophical digressions or personal accounts to give a human perspective. Although historically accurate, these books can pummel their readers with facts shorn of context – a reader may come away knowing what happened at Gettysburg, but not why it happened.
By contrast, in The Demon of Unrest, author Erik Larson selects a few personalities and events as keys to a narrative that focuses on people’s perceptions and misperceptions, leading to earnest actions guided by incomplete knowledge. This narrative method makes it difficult to avoid a small measure of sympathy for characters whose actions, when seen from a distance, fail any rational or moral test.
It might be argued that a book like this can only exist as a counterpoint to the many encyclopedic texts that accurately narrate and analyze major Civil War events. That seems fair, but without carefully researched human stories, students of history may never understand the motives behind the events. Also, this book is hard to put down. One might argue that a page-turner can’t also be a legitimate history lesson, but for many, this book may falsify that belief.
Some of my readers may know the term in media res, the practice of introducing a narrative “from the middle” – it’s a way to engage a reader more effectively than a strict chronological thread might. In this book, Larson crafts an ingenious structure in which one in media res invocation (“A boat in the Dark”, page 3) leads to another (“Cataclysm”, page 15) with a different, wider, scope. Not unheard of, but quite effective.
At great risk of oversimplifying, the primary narrative revolves around the 1861 reduction of Fort Sumter, located southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, in one of the first military actions of the war. It’s more accurate to say the events around Fort Sumter serve as a contextual anchor for the many digressions that make this book so fascinating – President James Buchanan’s indecisiveness and poor grasp of events prior to Lincoln’s election. Lincoln agonizing over how to act constructively in a drama where as a newcomer he doesn’t grasp the situation, at a time when virtually everyone misunderstands Lincoln. Lesser characters like William Seward, secretary of state under Lincoln, a politically skilled manipulator of events. Not to overlook descriptions of the many ideologues prone to see things in provincial ways, some influential all out of proportion to their grasp of events.
Not to detract from this excellent work, but the map of Charleston and its environs at the front of the book has no compass rose to guide the reader. As a result, textual references using compass bearings like “southeast of”, lead to confusion until the reader sorts out that for this map “North” is not “up”, but, more or less “up and to the right”. The map includes all that it must to support the narrative while fitting on a printed page, but this requires it to be rotated away from established map conventions. A simple arrow pointing north would solve this issue.
For color, historical context and accuracy I can’t praise this book highly enough. Students of history who know exactly what happened during the American Civil War, may learn from this book why those things happened.