This is Think. I'm John McKay sitting in for Chris Boyd. When Abraham Lincoln won election to office in November, 1860, it took just three days for South Carolina's General Assembly to label it a

hostile act and mere weeks to declare the state had seceded from the Union. Several other states

followed, even though Lincoln had repeatedly declared slavery in existing states to be invioling.

The next April all exploded in Charleston Bay with the

shelling of the Union Army's severely undermanned Fort Sumter. Eric Larson, author of such

critically acclaimed books as The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake, the last crossing of

Lusitania, chronicles that five-month period in a new book,

The Demon of Unrest, the Saga of Hubris,

Heartbreak, and Heralism at the dawn of the Civil War.

Eric Larson joins us this hour.

Welcome to Think.

Well, thank you very much.

A lot of us might remember reading

about the shelling of Fort Sumter in school,

but a little else.

So what I wanted to do was to set the stage, if we can, the title, the demon of unrest.

That really is about what, southern fear with the rise of this northern manufacturing and commerce and it might leave

the south behind? Yeah. So, first of all, the phrase demon of unrest comes from a letter

written by one of the historical actors in the book. I liked the image that it conjured in my mind, this idea of a demon loose in the

land stirring up distrust and discord and so forth. But yeah, the demon of unrest was the divide

between what Southerners are thinking and what, what Northerners were thinking

and what everybody else thought each other was thinking.

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