The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

On April 14, 1865, exactly four years after his surrender, Major Anderson returned to Fort Sumter to once again raise the American flag—the same one he left with four years earlier. Captain Doubleday—now a war hero for his bravery at Gettysburg—was also in attendance, as were thousands of others who came to pay their respects and celebrate the Union victory.

Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy had surrendered five days earlier, on April 9, at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Charleston had surrendered two months earlier to a force of Black soldiers. A total of 750,000 Americans died in the war.

The first major battle of the American Civil War occurred at Bull Run in July 1861 and was a Confederate victory. Edmund Ruffin participated in it and was pleased to have killed retreating Union soldiers. The carnage of the battle destroyed any naïve views toward the coming conflict; the war would be long and bloody.

Mary and James Chesnut spent much of the war in Richmond, Virginia, which was the Confederacy’s new capital. When the couple returned to South Carolina, they found that their plantation had been largely destroyed by Union forces, leaving them poor. Mary wrote that she “could tear [her] hair and cry aloud for all that is past and gone” (485).

The outspoken pro-enslavement orator James Hammond—of “Cotton is king” fame—died at home in 1864, five days after Lincoln’s reelection as President. Sally and her daughter Louisa, the enslaved women Hammond had abused, continued to live on his plantation until at least 1880, having by then been emancipated for 15 years.

The night of the flag raising at Fort Sumter in 1865, Anderson gave a public toast amid the celebrations, honoring “the good, the great, the honest man, Abraham Lincoln” (487). Meanwhile, and unknown to Anderson, Lincoln lay dying of a gunshot wound in Ford’s Theater in Washington, having been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.