On November 6, 1860, the United States was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. The passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
In his latest book, The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson offers a captivating account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including In the Garden of Beasts and The Devil in the White City, which is set to be a Hulu limited series. He last joined us in 2020 to talk about The Splendid and the Vile.
