- Hi, it's Ken Burns with another Unum Chat.

I am so honored and delighted to tell you that today's guest is the extraordinary writer, Erik Larson.

He is the author of many, many New York Times bestsellers, including "Devil in the White City," "In the Garden of the Beast, "The Splendid and The Vile," and now the latest, "The Demon of Unrest," a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism on the dawn of the Civil War, which will be available this spring.

"Demon of the Unrest" more than compliments our now decades old series on the Civil War.

Erik's book brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of 1860 that brings in Abraham Lincoln and the start of the war in April of '61.

Erik, thank you for joining us.

We're so thrilled to be able to-- - Pleasure, pleasure.

- To talk to you.

I'm such a huge admirer, and it's always an accomplishment to make a film, to write a book, but what's so extraordinary about your work is that they are in fact extraordinary, and the superlatives sort of run out.

And I wanted to start, though, with a kind of more general connection.

You've written some fiction, but mainly nonfiction history.

And I'm stuck that we both kind of work in and share a similar space.

That is to say we take moments from our past and try to turn them, you do, into compelling stories.

In your case, a book, in my case a film.

I have in my editing room a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says, "It's complicated."

I had a discussion many years ago with the feature filmmaker Steven Spielberg on stage where I was interviewing him, and we suddenly realized that we did the exact same thing.

Only he could make stuff up, and I couldn't.

And yet we are aware, you are aware of the enormous tension of taking facts and squeezing them into, for lack of a better word, Aristotelian poetics.

You know, a beginning, a middle, an end, a protagonist, antagonist, intricate character development, climax, denouement, all of those sorts of things.

And my putting that sign up more than a decade ago was to remind people that even a scene that's working dramatically may in fact not be as true as all of the difficult and complicated facts that sometimes suggest that a thing, and the opposite of a thing, as Wynton Marsalis said in our jazz film, could be true at the same time.

And so I wanted to know what's your relationship to that incredible tension between poetics, this drama of storytelling, and the facts?

Obviously, the facts win, but there is a conflict not dissimilar to a civil war that's taking place, I assume?

- Yeah, I don't really see it as a conflict at this point.

I mean, I think what it comes down to in the end is, at the very beginning, it's very foundational, is what idea you choose to do.

I mean, for example, when you did the Civil War, which came out, what, 1990, something like that?

- Yes, yes.

- You know, there was no conflict.

This is a story that unfolded with, you know, tragic momentum.

And if you hadn't done a good job, I'd be concerned, you know.

It was a great film, but it really captured that, the momentum and the suspense that existed already in the story.

And so that's really important.

- So when you are looking for that inherent, dramatic tension, is that what governs your choice of a subject?

Or maybe just maybe let me make it a little bit blunter.

How did you choose this subject and what kind of research do you undertake to sort of validate your suspicion or your assumptions and then in the large plow towards years' long projects?

And they take years to do for me, and I know for you.

- Right.

Well, you hit on the fundamental element for me in your opening of the question, which is I look for something, I have various criteria for what makes a good idea.

One of those is that there has to be something that is inherently energetic about the arc of that story, inherently suspenseful, whatever.

And that's what brought me to this.

This is not typically how my books arise.

But I think, I blame this on the pandemic.

You know, I was in the midst of a book tour from my previous book in 2020, midway, literally midway through the tour, shut down, came home, had a lot of time on my hands.

I started looking into various subjects, you know, just kind of meandering, you know.

Whatever occurred to me, I would, you know, of course turn to my new best friend, Google.

At the same time, if you recall, it was a period of significant political discord in this country, amplified by the pandemic, amplified frankly, by the management of the pandemic.

And, you know, there was a lot of, among the fringe, a lot of sort of dark talk about secession and civil war.

In this age, people talking about secession and civil war.

And so I thought, you know, I don't really know exactly how the US, the American Civil War started.

I know the basics.

So I started looking into that, just kind of how did that come to pass.

In the course of that, I came across this amazing collection of documents about the run up to the Civil War.

Volume one of this long series of, it's the the "War of the Rebellion," the official records, I'm sure you're familiar with it, the official records of the Union and Confederate armies.

What was striking to me when I opened, I managed to get a bound volume of the thing.

And after it arrived, after I disinfected it, and I started going through this volume, it's like God's gift to a writer.

Here it was this hundreds of documents, you know.

Telegram, response, letter, response, report, response, telegram, telegram, telegram, telegram, all capturing this run up to the Civil War, to America's greatest tragedy.

It's like, it's almost as though the story was just laid out for me.

So I started thinking, wow, this would be a really powerful thing to tell, and maybe it has more resonance today.

And then came the events of January 6th, 2021.

And I had, I'm sure you had the same feeling.

I had the weirdest feeling that some of the documents that I was reading could have been written today.

- [Narrator] Violence reached the floor of the United States Senate, where Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner with his cane.

Southern sympathizers sent Brooks new canes.

Members began carrying knives and pistols into the chamber.

Meanwhile, the nation's chief executive, James Buchanan, did nothing.

- [Speaker] A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved.

I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

(crickets chirping) - In 1861, the two moments prior to the Civil War beginning, the two moments of greatest concern in America were would the electoral vote come off and would Lincoln's inauguration come off?

And so I was, at that point, I was hooked.

That's when I really started diving in.

- Well, this is a riveting story, and I think for the sake of our listeners, you anchor the story in Charleston and at Fort Sumter, and ask, how on earth did South Carolina stayed in essentially economic decline become the fulcrum for America's greatest tragedy?

And from your research, tell me how Fort Sumter and Major Anderson's presence there take on such a critical role in, not just the brewing conflict, but how you framed it.

And what did folks, other folks, there's such an amazing cast of characters, which we'll get into, but a lot of South Carolinians from Preston Brooks and Edmund Ruffin and James Hammond play in pushing South Carolina, and therefore the Southern states, the slave-owning states, into war.

You know, it's not a civil war.

I'm working on a history of the revolution, that's a civil war.

This is a sectional war, but you know, for the purposes it's the Civil War.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, so South Carolina had always been in a, had long, not always, but long been in the state of what I, I guess I would call intellectual rebellion, dating to the 1830s with the Nullification Movement in the state, which is when the state tried to act to make federal laws not function within the state borders, unless, of course the South Carolinians wanted them to.

That was quashed by President Andrew Jackson in a very forceful way.

But, you know, there was this simmering discontent in South Carolina that was egged on by the so-called fire-eaters.

These were agitators who promoted secession at every turn.

One of those, Edmund Ruffin, is one of my, I won't say favorite characters, I mean.

- No, no, I'm with you.

- He is a fantastic villain, if I could say that.

And he was, you know, there was a class of these agitators called fire-eaters.

And I would put him in that class, even though he was not a very good public speaker.

And he rued the fact that he could not speak well, unlike other of the fire-eaters.

But he was a fire-eater all the same.

He loathed the North.

He was an advocate of succession at every single turn.

So he was one of those forces.

Now, he was from Virginia, but he looked to South Carolina as the compass for what should really happen with the South.

And so he became, he was one of those forces that edged South Carolina toward this act of secession.

- You deal with the word honor alike, which I, a lot, which I really like because it's a complicated word that's sort of lost kind of meaning in our contemporary times, but it's really freighted in this time.

And the planter society responds in their chivalry and how they live and refer to honor a lot.

They've even got a code book about it, you know, which gives people license if they're dishonored to even murder another person.

I get a sense reading the book that the code on the title page of each section, which contains quotes from that code duello to help us set the stage.

Many in Charleston are actually endeared to Major Anderson, the US Army commander whose holding Fort Sumter, and felt that he was behaving honorably.

And he moved his men sort of surreptitiously secretly from Moultrie to Sumter and looking to diffuse a crisis.

Lincoln is very much over his shoulder a little bit.

For a time the Confederate army allowed a small amount of food supplies and mail to be delivered.

How did the honor and affronts to Southern honor push us towards the war?

How real do you think the concept was?

- Yeah, well, first of all with regard to Anderson, initially, you know, Anderson was a Southerner.

He was a former slave holder.

His wife was from Georgia.

She was the daughter of a famous Revolutionary war hero.

And so there was a predisposition perhaps to see Anderson initially as one of us.

And Anderson, when he first got to Fort Moultrie.

You know, I should specify that Fort Moultrie is on Sullivan's Island outside Charleston.

It was a complete intact force, that was initially where his command was based.

It is telling that his headquarters at that fort was outside the fort.

And on the day that he took command of Fort Moultrie, he was very welcoming to the populace.

He had the chief of the fort guard open the gates to the fort.

And he said, "All are welcome here.

"We have no secrets."

There were, you know, concerts on the parapets.

People would dance and walk and so forth.

That was then.

Well, let me address first of all the honor thing on a broader scale.

There are two kinds of honor, this sort of thing.

The personal affront, if somebody sleeps with your wife, the code duello gives you full permission to go and engage that guy in a duel, you know.

And who knows how that's gonna come.

The code duello was essentially, orchestrated how one dealt with duals.

So there's that sort of micro element of honor.

But something broader was happening during this period.

The world was moving away from slavery.

Led by Britain in 1808 banning the international slave trade.

1838, banning slavery in all of its possessions, except some owned by the East India Company, apparently.

And simultaneously in the South, and partly in reaction to this, there was a movement called the Pro-Slavery Movement.

The pro-slavery writers became evangelists for the idea that slavery, far from being evil, slavery was a positive good.

That it benefited the slaves as opposed to harming them.

One of the foremost evangelists, and that was James Henry Hammond, who is another main character in my book.

He went on record in Congress.

He delivered the first pro-slavery speech in Congress.

Some decades later he had a quite famous speech in which he referred to enslaved Blacks as the mudsills of society.

They were, the mudsill being that layer of a structure between the earth and the actual frame of the structure.

You know, it was that kind of belief that enslaved people were the bedrock of the community, but they were also treated well.

This is their claim.

And they were saved from the kind of wage tyranny that Northerners had to deal with.

So you had this two worlds, you know, rocketing away from each other.

The civil, say civilized, you know, the more advanced thinking of Europe and the North.

You know, abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and so forth, condemning slavery at every turn.

And you had the South thinking, starting to think, or starting to promote for itself the idea that slavery was a positive good.

So therefore you could be a member of the upper crust in South Carolina, they called themselves the chivalry.

You could be a member of the upper crust in South Carolina and be proud of the fact that you own slaves.

Here's the conflict.

The North is condemning you.

The North is sending volumes of abolitionist tracts down to Charleston to, you know, filling up the post office with these things.

The Southerners who are viewing themselves as we're good guys.

You know, we keep slaves, but we treat them well and so forth.

They take offense.

If you could have had a duel, you know, where they slap each other and shoot it out then, they would've.

And in some ways the Civil War kind of, you know, metaphorically was a duel.

So that's where the honor came in as a really destructive force in the Civil War.

- Yeah, so underneath all of this, as people, the honor and all of this hides, pay no attention, Monticello says, we're a neoclassical building.

Pay no attention to the dumb waiters, you know.

It's hiding this system of slavery and bondage.

And that's at the heart of it.

And you introduce characters that are near and dear to me, like Mary Chesnut.

- But one thing I wanna specify though is that that's one of the interesting things about the later period in the 19th century is that they had ceased to hide it.

They were done with that.

We are not going to hide slavery.

We are going to, this is a good thing, and we're gonna be proud of it.

And that was a very fundamental change.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

- No, no, no, and that does anchor their position in order to meet the fury and the righteous morality of the abolitionists who are going, and they do.

So but can you talk a little bit about what the reality is of slavery there, Mary Chesnut.

And also I think the fact that we've got a lot of contradictory figures that are involved in this.

You know, Robert E. Lee is the head of the Confederate Army.

He opposes slavery.

He sees it as an evil.

He doesn't want the secession.

He doesn't believe in secession.

And yet he felt a loyalty to his country.

In those days, a country was your state.

And you have lots of people like Mary Chesnut who are confronted with the reality of a slave trade in the midst of sort of arguing in favor and participating in it.

It seems like an extraordinary moral dilemma that's compromising that honor.

- For some it was a moral dilemma.

Let me address this in two ways.

One of the revelations for me in doing my research for this book was when I finally, you know, the pandemic conditions eased enough that I was able to go into archives and so forth.

And when I was able at the Charleston Historical Society to actually see documents that one ordinarily doesn't obviously come across.

Here were flyers, for example, for slave auctions that listed even, you know, listed the names of all the slaves, the ages, and even if they had a particular profession like a cooper or a cook or something on that list.

And until you see this thing, how open this was on a public flyer, everything just laid out.

I mean, for me, it was a revelation.

As was the fact, when I went into further records, I believe it was the Bank of Charleston.

You know, there was no moral dilemma for these people who reaped huge financial rewards from the ownerships of slaves.

Slaves were capital.

And you see it as vividly at the Bank of Charleston.

When I came across mortgages that were secured by, quote-unquote, "Negroes."

Secured by the enslaved Blacks that these plantation owners owned.

That's how ingrained this was in that culture.

But then you had people like Mary Chesnut, you mentioned her.

I love her.

I would marry her if she were here today.

- Amazing, amazing.

- This wonderful contemporary-sounding woman, acid-tongued at times, conflicted about slavery.

But nonetheless, a slave owner.

She writes about how she witnessed a slave auction one day, and how it just really sort of crushed her.

On the other hand, she did not run back to her plantation and sell off her slaves.

And she reaped the rewards of slavery, the ease of life and so forth.

So, yeah, it was really interesting.

How some people resolve these conflicts.

- Yeah, it's-- - Or not resolve them.

- Or not resolve them, yeah.

And how they end up without giving it any of it away.

I wanna turn to a central figure in the war in our history, obviously Abraham Lincoln.

He inherited a turbulent presidency from his predecessor, Buchanan, who was all too ready to leave office before war broke out.

Maybe he's the worst president.

Maybe he's the second worst president.

You write, you write, "The pace at which the Union began "to disintegrate was breathtaking.

"And Lincoln had yet to set foot in Washington, DC."

As we know, he's elected in November.

By the end of November-- - Of 1860.

- Of 1860.

By the end of November, South Carolina has seceded.

They do not, by the way, mention nullification or state's rights or anything in their articles of secession.

But they do mention over and over again slavery.

So people who try to make the argument that it's just social differences, or political, or economic, let's remember, as your Bank of Charleston records suggest, that the economic wealth resided in the 4 million Americans owned by other Americans, 45% of the South.

4 million people in a 9 million population states of what would become the Confederacy, in their eyes, as you point out, the United States does not call it the Civil War.

They call it the War of the Rebellion.

They never once used the word confederates.

They say rebels from beginning to end.

Much like the British did about us when we wanted to be called patriots.

But as Lincoln traveled, it's one of those amazing road trips of all time, from Springfield to Washington for the inauguration, he had to strike a balance between standing firm against secession, that is placing Union first so as he wouldn't continue to push other states to secede.

Now, by the time he's there, and he's speaking at his inauguration, nine of the 11 are already gone.

They're gonna, the other dominoes are gonna fall.

But he's also keeping a hand at Delaware, particularly Maryland and Kentucky and places, you know, that he has to keep.

And his inauguration, and his Emancipation Proclamation, as you know, a year and a half later, does not free a single slave in territory that he controls.

He's willing to let the peculiar institution continue in order to salve the wounds of those people who are still benefiting in a Mary Chestnut like way, with the confused moral dilemma of that.

- [Narrator] Inauguration day in Washington was cloudy and cold.

A large, tense crowd gathered beneath the unfinished dome.

Cannon guarded the capitol grounds.

Sharpshooters lined the roof.

Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he denied the right of any state to secede, vowed to defend federal installations, and spoke directly to the South.

(lively band music) - [Speaker] In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.

The government will not assail you.

You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.

We are not enemies, but friends.

We must not be enemies.

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

- I was not one of the many who just thinks Lincoln was the be all, end all, you know.

I did not necessarily buy into the hagiography of Lincoln.

I didn't really know all that much about Lincoln except, you know, in terms of the basics and so forth.

I came to really kind of love Lincoln for his warmth and his humor.

But I also found it fascinating that, you know, his sense of justice was such, his sense of law was such that once he was elected, he recognized that he was not actually president yet.

He was very much a stickler for that.

He would not be president until the electoral vote was counted.

And really not until the inauguration.

And for better or worse, he took the stance early on not to say anything.

Not to, well, he did seed the clouds, if you will, with his opinions and so forth, through allies and whatnot.

But he really tried to keep silent on the whole thing until, until this trip to Washington, which I adored.

I mean, you as a filmmaker who seeks narrative every turn, me as a writer who seeks that as well.

The idea of forward motion, this thing that you can follow through the story, this wonderful journey where Lincoln literally wanted people, the people who elected him, mainly the North, wanted people to actually see him, to see him, to hear him, to get a feel for this guy that they had elected.

And he was very funny, very charming, I feel.

At a couple of points he let himself go.

Typically, these were extemporaneous speeches.

And, you know, some of the passion of what would ultimately color his presidential career came through.

But he symbolized that conflict.

He was very careful in what he said, except for those couple of occasions.

- I've gotta believe that FDR studied this assiduously.

Drove Hoover crazy 'cause he wanted, once Roosevelt was in, to share the blame.

And Roosevelt was like not until March 4th am I going to do anything, show my cards, show my hand.

And I think it's great.

Lincoln's got a much, I don't know, the worst economic crisis in the history of the world.

- But then, let's not forget that, I guess this backdrop, here's Lincoln who's doing this quite charming, I felt, train trip to Washington, which ends, and we can talk about that a bit.

But then juxtapose against the administration of James Buchanan.

This was a man who wanted above all else to get out of office without a war on his time, and get back to his estate, Wheatland, outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was for all intents and purposes a plantation without slaves, you know.

He was very much a pro-Southern guy.

And also he was ineffective.

At one point, he gives a speech to Congress where he basically gives up.

He basically gives up and says, "It's up to Congress."

So that's the backdrop.

- And so this part of the drama culminates in this magnificent speech that is given.

His first inauguration where he's trying to do lots of things.

A good deal of it is a complicated lawyer slash psychologist talking about what, you know.

Secession has a logical dead end, which is if a state can secede from a nation, then a county from a state, from a city from a county, from a neighborhood, from this, a clan from a neighborhood, a family from a clan, a person from the fam... And all of a sudden you're into psychological schizophrenia.

He's really kind of good on it.

And then at the end, just like his second inaugural, which starts kind of Old Testament and then ends New Testament, he extends in this Southern city with this Southern audience one of the most, you know.

He says, "We must not be enemies, we must be friends "though passion may have strained our bonds of affection."

You know, he then has this last sentence, which is arguably one of the greatest sentences ever written in the English language.

That is an attempt, it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Two more states are gonna fall.

But it speaks to us of his able to see more.

Tell me about your relationship to that last sentence that begins the mystery.

- Well, first of all, I love it.

And it was sort of inspired by the guy who became the Secretary of State, William Seward.

But, you know, one of the striking things is that all along Lincoln made a point of saying that he was not going to disrupt slavery in the states where it existed.

He even went so far as to say that he would support the Fugitive Slave Act, which empowered planters to go into Northern communities to capture fugitive slaves and was reviled by the North.

He would even endorse the Fugitive Slave Act.

He said these things.

The South, for various reasons, did not, arguably, could not listen.

Here were the fire-eaters saying, "No, he wants to abolish slavery."

He essentially was the antichrist.

So that when he actually won the election, November 6th, 10 states did not have him on the ballot.

The fear that he generated, the reaction was intense.

And he was mystified.

He's like, you know, I have said nothing about abolishing slavery.

I've said, you know, we're gonna maintain it in those states where it is.

Now, his belief was that if he did that over time, slavery would eventually extinguish himself.

And I think he was right in that thinking.

He never got a chance.

- Yeah, I think this is interesting.

And I'm curious also about Seward's role because he's always struggling, as Lincoln is, to not legitimize the existence of a Confederate force.

And how you don't actually reply, and you don't not even not have meetings.

You just sort of-- - Was that wonderful or not?

- You don't hear.

Can you talk about that tension?

What is it, I mean, they are dealing with almost like a Q Anon thing.

I mean, there's nothing that Lincoln could do it at some point that is gonna convince them that he is not this.

So there's an attempt to sort of keep the United States sort of quietly in a position to welcome them, but also not in any way legitimize these secessionist and sort of perpetuation and pro-slavery and pro expansion of slavery.

- Right, well, so, so you're referring to this.

I said, I found it, I found it actually remarkable.

I, you know, whenever you delve into something in real depth, you see it in a very different way than you might have gone into it initially.

This was a case where three so-called commissioners from the South were coming to Washington proud of the fact that they were the scions of this new empire and convinced that, of course, the United States would deal with them as if they were simply another power.

And they couldn't stand it that Seward wouldn't even give them the time of day.

And Seward, they make a series of requests.

Seward writes a formal reply, does not give it to them.

Puts it in the archives, leaves it there.

Everybody knows it's there.

And here's this game that says, okay, who's gonna take that thing out and start, you know, conceivably the Civil War.

So this document sits, I can't remember exactly how many days, 24 days or something like that, before it's finally called for by these commissioners.

And this is just this utter rejection of them and all that they stand for.

And so they go home, you know, with their tails between their legs.

And this does not help the situation one bit.

It's important to also to know though that Seward, Seward really resented the fact that he was not president.

He really thought he should have won the presidency.

He should have been nominated by the Republican Party.

Again, we have to specify that Republican party in that era was the anti-slavery party.

The Democrats were the pro-slavery party.

He felt he should be the Republican nominee.

He felt he should have been president.

This one point, there's one point where somebody was talking about, you know, a potential foreign appointee being disappointed.

And Seward explodes, he says, "Disappointed?"

- Yes.

- "I know disappointment."

- Yeah.

- So, so you have that in the mix also.

And Seward had this belief, this faith, that the Union, the pro-Union sentiment in the South was very strong.

He could not, he would not let that idea go.

And that was another element of the mix.

(solemn piano music) - [Narrator] Abraham Lincoln's problems were not confined to fighting rebels alone.

The president's unwieldy cabinet included former conservative Whigs, free soil Whigs, and Union Democrats.

Four had been his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

Nearly all were privately sure they could do a better job than their chief.

Secretary of State, William H. Seward, hoped to replace Lincoln.

Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, wanted to replace Seward.

Mary Todd told her husband to get rid of both of them.

Instead, Lincoln fired War Secretary Simon P. Cameron, a Pennsylvania boss so corrupt, said Lincoln, "that the only thing he wouldn't steal was a red hot stove."

The new Secretary of War was Edwin M. Stanton, an able, ruthless war Democrat from Ohio, who worried about what he believed to be Lincoln's painful imbecility.

On one thing the cabinet was agreed.

General George McClellan was not moving fast enough against the Confederates.

"The Army Secretary of War," Stanton said, "has got to fight or run away."

The champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.

- So you, the book really ends on the climax of what is, you know, your end is the beginning.

And that's when General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard directed his Confederate gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter at that moment.

- A pupil of Anderson's at West Point and professed to be friends with Anderson.

- Exactly.

And you detail, as we do too, you in much greater detail, that this is the most ironic of circumstances because there is not a single human casualty.

The only casualty is a Confederate horse.

And it is a bloodless beginning to the bloodiest war in American history.

Can you talk about what happened at that moment, why it happened, and then maybe what's happening to Anderson and what's happening to Ruffin and whither do some of your characters.

I think we know the Lincoln story enough that we can follow through the arc of the war.

But you have made premise content and it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing.

It's almost as if the only thing you needed to see, like Luis Tiant, the picture was the windup.

You don't even, you didn't need to have the pitch.

The war becomes, the war happens, as Lincoln will say, you know?

- Yeah, yeah.

Some of the things that I've found really compelling in terms of piecing together this narrative was thinking about Anderson.

Here's this guy.

He's got 75 men in a fort designed to be impregnable.

If it were fully loaded, and if it were fully staffed, it was supposed to have 600 men.

He had 75.

Over time, with no instructions coming from Washington, he simply holds his ground.

But as he's in this fort, as he and his men are in this fort, they can literally hear at times the work being done, the furious efforts by the Confederates to build batteries of heavy artillery aimed at the fort.

He can hear this.

They can see this, all this is happening.

And they know that not a good thing is coming.

So then here comes this, here comes the beginning of this bombardment.

And I remarked also in turn, harking back to honor, the exchanges, the correspondence, the telegrams, the messages and so forth, leading up to, let's say the, well, leading up to right before the bombardment, were so courteous and so chivalrous.

Just dripping with this like, no, after you, no, please, you know, all this kind of thing.

Even though, even though, you know, General Beauregard, you know, was doing everything he possibly could to ensure that Anderson and his men would be slaughtered when this thing began.

So here we are basically the morning that the bombardment begins, an ultimatum is delivered to Anderson.

Anderson and his officers reject it.

They are told that the bombardment will begin whatever, at 4:20 AM or something.

And Beauregard was really kind of annoyed by the way that it did not begin at 4:20.

It began at 4:30.

This was something he was a stickler about.

So this bombardment begins.

The way it begins, there is a signal shot fired from Fort Johnson.

It's an old revolutionary war era sort of a relic that has been re-armed quite near the fort.

Lobbed some mortar into the air.

That's the signal for the firing to begin.

Then our friend Edmund Ruffin steps up to the plate fires the first combat shot of the Civil War, and is delighted with the opportunity.

And goes on to, goes on to even more egregious behaviors, actually.

But one footnote about Ruffin is that early on he was one of those who really, a big part of my book is what caused, what brought Americans to actually imagine the wholesale killing of one another.

What were these forces that came together.

Into that mix is Edmund Ruffin, who wrote a book called "Anticipations of the Future," in which he envisioned a sort of a massive John Brown like raid against the South, repulsed by Southern forces, who then advance on the North, burn New York City to the ground, corpses everywhere.

They hang the John Brown people from a tree, all from the same tree so that the vultures can eat them.

I mean, this guy was, this guy, Ruffin, I should say Ruffin, Ruffin was ruthless.

So into that mix.

And so he's the guy that the South honors with the opportunity to fire the first combat shot of this bombardment.

The bombardment begins.

Impossible to imagine, I think, for us today.

Although I try to imagine, I mean, what this must have been like of all these guns firing at once, firing at Anderson and his men.

Just the noise and the power.

But the men, the garrison, the officers, at least to read their memoirs and so forth, did not seem phased.

They were quite a heroic bunch.

So this thing goes on for three, six hours, I think.

Something, three, four, three, six hours until finally, finally before Sumter is engulfed in flame, heavy smoke.

There is absolutely no hope for Anderson and his men.

And ultimately, with some very interesting wrinkles in between, ultimately, he surrenders, he surrenders.

And then honor again comes to play.

You know, he is allowed to salute the American flag.

He demands a 100-gun salute, and is granted that very thing.

And is offered free transit to wherever he wants to take his garrison.

They want to go to New York.

It's then, and this is one of the ironies, it's then that honor, honor becomes sort of the devil.

Because of this quest for honor, this quest for this salute, we're gonna leave this fort head high saluting the American flag.

A canon misfires, and the first two casualties of the Civil War occur.

One immediately, one soon afterwards because of this misfire of a cannon.

Then Anderson, Anderson, relatively undeterred, says okay, we're just gonna go with a 50-gun salute and call it a day.

So that's how it all ended.

But the key thing, then, next day, Lincoln issues his proclamation demanding, asking for volunteer militia forces to help deal with the coming war.

And that's the thing that ends the game.

- [Narrator] The Civil War began at 4:30 AM on the 12th of April, 1861.

General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard ordered his Confederate gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter, at that hour, only a dark shape out in Charleston Harbor.

Confederate Commander Beauregard was a gunner, so skilled as an artillery student at West Point that his instructor kept him on as an assistant for another year.

That instructor was Major Robert Anderson, Union commander inside Fort Sumter.

(cannons blasting) - [Speaker] All the pent up hatred of the past months and years is voiced in the thunder of these cannon.

And the people seem almost beside themselves in the exaltation of a freedom they deem already won.

- [Narrator] The signal to fire the first shot was given by a civilian, Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia farmer and editor who had preached secession for 20 years.

"Of course," he said, "I was delighted to perform the service."

(cannons blasting) - So it's just a riveting, riveting book.

You brought this up before, and I wanna delve a little bit into it.

Supposedly Winston Churchill and 20 other people are supposed to have said that history is written by the victors.

And a good deal of American history, it's very clear if you've seen a movie like "Birth of a Nation" or "Gone With the Wind," that it's often written by the losers and often rewritten.

We've inherited most of our lives a reconstruction period, which is seen as bad.

When reconstruction was an attempt to figure out what extending civil rights to newly-emancipated slaves would mean in the states of the former Confederacy.

And you yourself draw the parallels right at the beginning, in your note to the readers titled so beautifully, so poetically, "Dark Magic."

"As I watched the capital assault," meaning January 6th, "unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling "that present and past had merged.

"It's unsettling that in 1861, two of the greatest moments "of national dread centered on the certification "of the electoral vote and the presidential inauguration.

"January 6th also marked the very first time "that a Confederate flag was brought "into the Capitol building.

"When we talk about civil war today, we talk about," excuse me, "about a nation divided, which is of course true, "but shouldn't we really focus on a nation that, "however slowly, also took it upon itself to end slavery "and to rethink our future?"

What are your other connections that you make as the book passes from process to product and is now being shared with people?

What do you wanna say?

What warnings, what help can you offer?

Maybe there's something that you see in what's going on.

History doesn't repeat itself, but as Twain supposedly said, it rhymes.

And this is a big rhyme that you've identified.

- Well, you know, I think the takeaway for me, you know, there, once again, there is all this talk about more civil war than secession.

Actually, you hear people referring to civil war almost daily in one context or another.

And there's a feature film coming out called "Civil War" based on a contemporary civil war.

And there's a book came out a year or so ago about how civil wars start.

I mean, it's in the zeitgeist.

And I guess the thing that I feel most strongly, you know, having done this research, having gone through this period leading up to Fort Sumter, the thing I feel strongly about is, look, when you hear people talking about this, when you hear people talking about civil war, take 'em seriously.

Take 'em seriously.

Don't dismiss this as a whew, you gotta be kidding me.

Take it seriously 'cause, you know, the inconceivable is always conceivable to somebody.

- I think that's exactly it.

Ruffin, Edmund Ruffin's, apocalyptic visions are, weren't fulfilled, but certainly the chivalry and the honor codes belied what was about to happen, which was now, thanks to the scholarship of Drew Gilpin Faust, you know, that we think it's not 600, 620, 630, perhaps as many as 750,000 Americans in this sort of apocalyptic moment.

Shelby Foot told me that the Civil War, that American history was this clear river that ran into a bloody, bloody lake and ran out clear again.

And that there are always in the imagination of the unscrupulous people, the unprincipled people, as I think Alexander Hamilton worried about it in Federalist conversations with Madisons and others that would perhaps as Jefferson worried, you know, fail to win reelection and then, you know, contest the vote.

And so you have, at the very beginning, everybody working on a document in which they're trying to reverse engineer the very worst of our characteristics.

But part of this is this vision of bloodshed and civil war that somehow is incubated in this as the "Casey at the Bat" poem, in this favored land.

And so, I think your book is a magnificent contribution to this story because it is so restrained.

It does not have to go into the Civil War.

It goes into it, and then we know what is happening.

I'm just so grateful, Erik, for your scholarship and for, and I think it doesn't get said enough about your work, is just the beauty of your prose.

You are a great, great stylist, and you sort of finished something.

And I remember this with "The Devil in the White City."

I certainly remembered it in "The Garden of the Beast," is that you kind of went, did I just read a novel, you know?

And that is, I think, the highest compliment I can pay.

- Oh, good, thank you, thank you.

- It's been a great conversation.

We're so happy to have had a chance to talk with Erik Larson about his new book, "The Demon of Unrest."

I really highly recommend it and get to understand a little bit about the seeds of where we are right now.

Thank you all very much for paying attention.

- Thank you.