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

“Stowe had delivered perhaps the ultimate insult to the South’s honor, attacking an institution that decades of proslavery writing by James Hammond, the fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, and others had positioned as a thing of beauty and beneficence.”

This passage, which refers to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-enslavement novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, shows that enslavement had become closely interwoven into the Southern cultural identity by the 1850s. The fact that Southern planters like Hammond and Ruffin viewed slavery as “a thing of beauty” underlines The Challenging Nature of Honor by demonstrating how an overinflated sense of honor can warp personal perceptions of right and wrong. Erik Larson’s focus on Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a work of fiction—as a key part of the national enslavement debate shows how both pro- and anti-enslavement advocates used all methods at their disposal to argue for their diverging perspectives on the issue.

“No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

This quote from the Southern planter James Hammond while speaking before Congress epitomizes Southern overconfidence in their position relative to the North—an overconfidence that contributed to the secession movement. Hammond, among others, believed that the North would have to concede to Southern demands because the South controlled America’s cotton production, and cotton was needed across the country and also by potential allies like Britain. Hammond’s assertion would prove to be incorrect. His false view of the situation was tied into