With tensions rising, book explores personalities behind the Civil War

With rumors of unrest and "The Civil War" playing in multiplexes around the country, it's high time to look back at the last time Americans came to blows with each other.

Erik Larson, the best-selling popular historian, does just that in "The Demon of Unrest."

Larson has taken half-forgotten bits of history and brought them back to life, in books like "Isaac's Storm" (about the 1906 Galveston hurricane), "The Devil in the White City" (in large part, about America's first major serial killer) and "The Splendid and the Vile" (about Winston Churchill during the London Blitz).

In "The Demon of Unrest," he focuses on the road to the Civil War in 1860 and 1861, taking the siege of Fort Sumter as his centerpiece.

None of this is exactly surprising, thanks to people like Shelby Foote and Ken Burns. Larson, however, puts his personal twist on it by shining a light on some of the personalities in the conflict.

And with such characters, the South seems to have the edge. We meet Mary Boykin Chesnut, the diarist and wife of a sometime U.S. senator from South Carolina. Smart and ambitious, Chesnut longed to be at the center of things, perhaps as the wife of a Confederate envoy in London or Paris. (Unfortunately, her husband proved a bit of a dud.) Her comments about the passing scene were always tart and -- unlike most men -- she harbored few illusions about what war would mean for the South.

Then there's James Henry Hammond, sent by South Carolina to the U.S. Senate to defend slavery -- which he did in a famous speech, coining the phrase "Cotton is King." A poor youth in a state with an entrenched aristocracy, Hammond has risen the old-fashioned way: He married an ugly heiress. Hammond became governor of South Carolina, but like so many other Southern politicians, sex did him in. He was caught having sexually molested his teen-aged nieces. (He also fathered children by his slaves, but that was a common peccadillo, almost not worth mentioning.) The coming sectional showdown rescued him from oblivion.

Then there was Edmund Ruffin, a planter who had advocated secession for decades. His fellow Virginians regarded him as a crank, with his wild white hair. (In photos, he looks rather like Rick, the mad scientist from "Rick and Morty.") South Carolinians, however, treated him like a prophet. He was allowed to sit with the delegates at the state's secession convention -- and when the attack began on Fort Sumter, Ruffin was allowed to fire the first cannon.

In Washington, President James Buchanan -- nicknamed "Aunt Fancy" -- did nothing in particular. A Pennsylvania Democrat who'd made a career of compromising with Southern interests, he seemed to hope that South Carolina would just calm down and come to its senses. In Springfield, Illinois, president-elect Abraham Lincoln seethed. He would not be inaugurated until early March, and in the meantime, there was little he could do.

"The Demon of Unrest" reminds us that America in 1860 was a much smaller country. Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the Fort Sumter garrison had been an instructor at West Point when P.G.T. Beauregard -- now the general commanding the Confederate forces surrounding him -- was a cadet.

Yet, while Larson tells a ripping yarn, strong on the Who, What and When, he's a little vague on the Why of things, and that's important.

Cotton might have been king, but it was a greedy king. Cotton crops sucked the nutrients out of soil like a 10-year-old drinking a Slurpee in July. Fertilization and crop rotation were poorly understood. (Edmund Ruffin had first gained fame for discovering that spreading substances like marl improved crop yields.) In South Carolina, countless fields were played out, and the state now made its money selling slaves to newer territories on the Gulf of Mexico.

To keep cotton, then, and the slave economy that made so many so rich, the South needed to expand. They needed new territories for new slave states. But Republicans like Lincoln stood opposed to an expansion of slavery into the territories. Lincoln and the Republicans solemnly vowed that they would not interfere with slavery in any existing state -- but that wasn't good enough. So, a showdown was on.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: 'The Demon of Unrest' looks at personalities behind the Civil War