The Demon of Unrest

"You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail."

-William T. Sherman, 1860

Finding myself unable to put down The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson's book about the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter in April of 1861.

I had it in my head that this would be a work of historical fiction, when actually it is a meticulously researched narrative that fleshes out key characters in the saga, some familiar and some not.

There's the steady Robert Anderson, commander of the fort's garrison, still partially disabled from wounds suffered in the Mexican War that would ultimately kill him a decade later, married to a Southerner and sympathetic to their grievances even as he stood by his oath as an officer to a fault.

And James Hammond, an ambitious politician who came from nothing to become, through marriage, one of the largest slaveholders in South Carolina, a guy of extreme sexual needs that included a homosexual affair in college, rolling in the hay with his four nieces to the horror of his wife, and regularly raping his favorite slave and her twelve year old daughter. A real peach, that one. Sort of a Trump with a drawl.

I guess part of the draw of the book is its relevance to the moment. Now the Confederates have taken the Capitol, the president isn't Lincoln but a modern James Hammond, and the free states are making ominous noises about resisting if and when El Duce sends in the Guardsmen from reliable Confederate states to crush his political opponents. Some commentators have noted that the Blue State governors and their AGs are on almost daily calls to organize their resistance to the feds, calling it a "soft secession".

In a way, this is a far more dangerous situation than we faced in early 1861. Now it's the feds who are advancing a white supremacist agenda, the feds who are on a revanchist quest to save "our way of life", the feds who reach for tools of terror and intimidation to force their will on a majority who didn't vote for this. And with technological tools at their disposal that Jefferson Davis could not have dreamed of.

Of course, I was always taught that it was Lincoln and his war machine that crushed the plucky Southern freedom fighters. One of my best friends in the Air Force proudly recounted how his alma mater, the Citadel, fired the first shots of the war when a group of cadets manning an artillery battery fired on the Star of the West when the ship attempted to reach Fort Sumter with supplies.

I even owned an album, when I was eight or so, of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing the songs of the Confederacy. I still remember the Bonnie Blue Flag:

We are a band of brothers

And native to our soil

Fighting for the property

We gained by honest toil

Hurrah! Hurrah!

For Southern rights hurrah!

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag

That bears a single star.

Don't think too hard about the "property" they purchased with the sweat of their brows. I sure didn't when I was singing along in my bedroom in Georgia.

We were misled about all that, just as my ancestors were misled when they left their small farms to fight for the preservation of their planter neighbors. One died in his first engagement, at Shiloh. Will our grandkids be allowed to find out what actually happened, back then or at this fraught moment in American history?

I guess that depends on who wins, given the old bromide about the victors writing the history books.

Time for what's shaping up to be an easy day that includes a trip up to Canandaigua for a condo board meeting to discuss our collapsed patio. Did I already write about that? Maybe tomorrow.