Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Country of Unrest with Erik Larson

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Following January 6th and the current political climate, some Americans fear there will be a “new Civil War.”  But what does that truly mean? If you are a lover of history, this conversation is one you won’t want to miss. Author Erik Larson joins us to discuss his new book, The Demon of Unrest, which is set shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Dive into the mindsets and captivating portrayals of leaders on the brink of a war that eventually killed 750,000 Americans, and injured millions more. Special thanks to our guest, Erik Larson, for joining us today. Host: Sharon McMahon Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Production Assistant: Andrea Champoux  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here's Where It Gets Interesting is now available ad-free. Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. And I am very delighted to be welcoming today's guest, Eric Larson. Eric Larson is one of those writers where I don't care what the book is, I would still add it to my cart if it has Eric

Larson's name on it. He's one of those history writers. He's just such a fantastic storyteller. So I cannot wait to dive into this conversation about the demon of unrest. And whether you are a reader or you are an aspiring writer or you're an author, I really think you're going to get something out of this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with Eric Larson today. Thanks so much for being here. My pleasure.

I mean, you're an author who your name is attached to a book and it is immediate. It's like EduCart. Your books are so incredibly researched and so detailed and you're such a master storyteller. I wonder if you can start by telling the listeners, what is the demon of unrest? Well, the demon of unrest, first of all, the title comes from a letter that one of the characters in the book has written. The demon of unrest is the thing that is unsettling the country. Loose in the country is discord and animosity and so forth. And that is the demon of unrest.

So this book is set shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. So that's what they're referring to, that like the country is so unsettled. There's this unrest afoot. And the idea that it's like a demon of unrest almost makes it seem like there is some kind of nefarious actor at work. Like this is- Well, there are. are. There were nefarious actors, but yes. What I love about the idea of the demon of unrest is the idea of this almost mystical evil character afoot in the land, whispering in one ear, whispering in another

ear. Now, of course, that's all metaphorical, but it's kind of a nice image in terms of the sheer division that existed back in 1860 leading up to the start of the Civil War. I wonder if you can share with us what about this story was so compelling to you? Because, you know, maybe you're aware, Eric, but there have been a couple of books written about the Civil War. I just have a handful. But yeah, yeah. Actually, I have to preface this by saying, if you Google me, I am on record as saying numerous times that I will never write a book about the Civil War.

And so here I am, as a late mother used to say, never say never. But you know, what happened was, I have to sort of tell you the origin story to really get at why I decided to do this. It goes back to the pandemic. I had been in the middle of my book tour for my book, The Splendid and the Vile, about Winston Churchill. Pandemic lockdown occurred midway through my tour, and suddenly I was home and did not expect to be.

I had a lot of time on my hands. I thought, okay, I'm going to devote this time to trying to find my next project. So I started looking at various things. And, you know, about that time, there's a lot of discord, and still there is, unfortunately, in this country. And people were sort of, some people sort of on the fringe were muttering about there should be a new civil war and secession and, you know, rash states, a couple of rash states we're thinking about. We ought to secede, to which I was very glad to say, go ahead. But there was this discord. And hearing all that, I just suddenly started thinking, why not look into, I don't know anything about how the civil war really started.

I mean, no, roughly. I just started looking into it, and I came across this collection of documents. It's called The War of the Rebellion, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. I managed to order a bound volume of volume one, shipped to my Long Island readout, my pandemic readout, where after disinfecting it,

I started reading this book. And it was amazing. It was hundreds of documents arranged in scrupulous chronological order leading up to the start of the Civil War. Now, this is like manna for any writer. I mean, the chronology is there. And the TikTok, as I like to refer to it, was there. And I became just absolutely engrossed in this moment by moment run up the inevitability of it to the Civil War. So I thought, yeah, you know, I think I could take a crack at this and, you know, put on my Alfred Hitchcock hat and try to tell the story in a way that it hasn't been told before. try to tell the story in a way that it hasn't been told before, in a way that ideally readers will be able to immerse themselves in the story, suspend their knowledge of what happened, and emerge at the end of this as having feeling as if they had lived through this period.

Well, adhering absolutely to the facts, I have to stress. So that's how it got started. And then, you know, I was still thinking to myself, what am I doing writing about the Civil War, you know, and then came the events of January 6, 2021. And I realized, wait a minute, the story is not dead. The story is not an old story. This thing has come back to life. And that's what made me, that's what really, really gave me the final momentum to finish the book. Do you feel like that same spirit, that same demon of unrest is afoot in America today? I don't feel that it's the same demon, but it is afoot in the land.

That's partly the reason, I guess, that I chose the title Demon of Unrest, because I do think it's been sort of unleashed again, again, metaphorically. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, there was just a new TV show that literally just launched, I want to say, like in the last two weeks called The Civil War, which is about a potential new civil war in America. People ask me this all the time. Are we on the brink of civil war? And again, this is not in your book, but many people may not have thought of when they think about could we have a civil war again, is that there's no way that boundary, these states want to stay, it would look a lot different. But nevertheless, I wonder for people who, you know, are not particularly well versed in the start of the Civil War, as you mentioned, this is not a topic that you ever

found yourself particularly interested in until this moment. What were the actual factors aside from like, hey, you don't want us to enslave people and we want to be able to continue to live our way of life. Most people can say that. But walk us through what was the actual mindset of the people that you are profiling in this book? Because the story involves a number of super interesting characters, and I would love to hear more about their mindsets. Well, yeah. I mean, to me, what the book is really about is the coalescence of various forces that came together that brought Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, brought them to the point where they could actually imagine

the wholesale killing of one another. So many forces involved, it's really sort of hard to summarize. There were aspects of individual personalities that were very important in the story, people who received a certain self-affirmation by stirring up trouble. Then you had another element of the story was that we had an absolutely passive, inept president in place, James Buchanan, who allowed events to unfold without any attempt at interfering with them. But the fundamental thing, the fundamental tectonic source of the energy that led to the Civil War, the negative energy, was that the world had come to the point where it utterly reviled slavery. You know, everybody kept slaves prior to 1800, but Britain led the way in abolishing slavery. Slavery became anathema

to the nations, to the civilized world, if you will, to the North and so forth. Simultaneously, the South had moved in a very different direction. The South had moved away from seeing enslaved people as beasts to be controlled to something very different. There was the so-called pro-slavery movement by which the South managed to persuade itself that slavery was a good thing. Slavery was good for the South. Slavery was good for the enslaved. And they would make comparisons, for example, that, you know, what's worse, being a wage slave in the North, a free man in the North, subject to the vagaries of capitalism, potentially thrown out on the street at a moment's notice? Or is it better to be enslaved where all your needs are met day in,

day out, regardless of economic necessity? Which was a very, when you think about it, it's just such a contorted way of justifying slavery. But you had these two worlds moving away faster and faster and farther and farther. And that was the fundamental division that led to the Civil War. You talk about in your book, like, how could South Carolina, which was by no stretch of the imagination, the most influential state, which was by no stretch, you know, any kind of an influential powerhouse. How could South Carolina tip off an event that would ultimately kill 750,000 people?

And I wonder if you could share with us what it was in South Carolina that actually was the tectonic, as you mentioned, or the explosive device that led to all of this. Well, you know, it is still actually considered something of a mystery about how this all came to be in South Carolina, which, as you say, was at that point was a state in decline, had been sort of left aside by the Industrial Revolution and so forth. But it had a long history of political activism, basically anti-union activism, dating for decades before the Civil War, a lot having to do with the patriarchal structure of society in South Carolina and in the South, but in particular in South Carolina, where the planting aristocracy held all the power it historically had. So you throw into this mix so-called fire eaters who are agitating for secession, saying that, you know, that all the

North wants to do is abolish slavery. We have to basically, we have to get out of here. You know, otherwise we're going to face economic doom and we can do really well on our own. We can become a southern empire like nothing the world has seen. Now, a lot of this came to a focus in South Carolina, in part because of the federal presence in Charleston Harbor, the United States Army presence in Charleston Harbor, which South Carolinians really, really resented. This just fit into their sense of Northern tyranny controlling the South. And this focal point became the federal presence and ultimately further focused on Fort Sumter. I would love to hear a little bit more because I know people are always very interested in the behind the scenes of putting together a book that is, first of all, very compelling to read, is true to the facts, and that it is adding something to the

discourse about this time period, about these events. That's not just a rehashing in hunched up language of events that have been well chronicled in the past. You can't just read a book and be like, well, I'm going to write my own book based on this one book. I sure wish it were that easy. Yeah. I paraphrased it and be like, oh, that turned out great. This obviously requires years of work on your part. Years. And first of all, it's not your first rodeo.

Are you using the same process in all of your books? Do you have your like, this is my routine? Well, there's always a fundamental similarity in terms of process. But this book was actually, this book was for very material reasons, was actually very different than my prior books because of the pandemic. Ordinarily, when I settle on an idea, the very first thing I do, without even really thinking very much about it or doing much planning, is to parachute into an archive just to see what's available and to sort of dwell in the tactile world of other people's letters and diaries and so forth.

I derive a lot of energy from that. I couldn't this time because archives were closed, and even if they had been open, I would not have wanted to travel to them. So it was very different. So I had to rely a lot on online resources. Now, happily for this era, there are a lot of really good databases, Lincoln's papers, the papers of various characters in my book are online and online in a trustworthy form, which is very important. So that was very different. I have to emphasize that this book of documents, this was the spine that gave me the TikTok.

And I'm not talking about, of course, the website. I'm talking about TikTok in terms of how I talk about it. I know a lot of other writers talk about that as well. It's the moment by moment, how a story advances, how suspense builds. It's the TikTok. But you can have that tick-tock, but you still need to bring to life the various characters who are part of making this happen.

And that's where the fun came in, if you will, is going into the lives of these various characters. And I say character, I mean nonfiction actors, but I refer to them as characters, go into their lives and bring forth all the rich details of their lives. Like one of my characters, James Henry Hammond, the fact that he had a sexual dalliance of four of his nieces, that he also slept with two of his enslaved women. women. Details like this that sort of bring to the fore some of the wrenching aspects of slavery, some of the wrenching aspects of politics in that era. So going to the lies of all these kind of bringing them forth, setting them loose on the page, and then see where it goes.

When you're doing your research, are you researching and then you're like, okay, that's good. And then you will work on writing it and then you research some more and then be like, I love that. I'm going to write that down. Or are you somebody who does all the research and then once everything is compiled, then you get started writing? How do you strike the balance between research and writing? My approach is sort of a hybrid of all that. I do as much research as I can up front. I want to achieve a critical mass of the material that I need to tell my story. But inevitably, I get to a point where I have this critical mass. And I also start feeling like wow this story really wants to be

told it really wants me to get started and then I go into what I refer to as my page a day mode where this is something that dates to when I had toddlers I would get up at four o'clock in the morning and my goal would be to write a single page start at the beginning to write a single page, start at the beginning, write a single page. I discipline myself to stop at the end of that page because that makes the whole writing process so much easier. If I stop, I will stop in the middle of a sentence or in the middle of a paragraph because then I know the next morning when I get up, I will be instantly productive. Not only that, the brain hates things that are incomplete. And overnight, my brain will be processing, processing, even without me knowing it. So by the time I sit down the next morning, not only will I finish that sentence and that

next paragraph and that page, I will know what the next five pages are going to be. I won't write them. I will stop once again when I'm ahead of the game, stop and continue the research from then on for the day. So the research is going on at that point. I've started to write. Gradually, page a day becomes two pages a day because five, 10, 20, whatever. And then the writing becomes the main thing that I do during the day. But the research never stops. The research actually literally does not stop until the book is in what we call first pass proofs or even second or third pass proofs, because you always have to go back and look for

something. What did streetlights really look like in London and whatever date, that kind of thing. Do you find it difficult to leave well enough alone? Yes. Yeah. I mean, especially in something like this where, where, you know, there's so many directions you can go, so many sources that you can tap. Yes. It never ends. Yeah. And even as it is, I mean, honestly, honestly, we, we, my editor, God bless her. She works so hard in this book. She helped me cut 40,000 words from this book. Oh, my goodness.

framework for suspense, I imagined that this book would be 250 pages maximum. But man, you know, the more you get into this, the more the characters, the richness of the various people, suddenly, suddenly I had a book that would be, would have been 800 pages. Thank God for my editor, you know, cutting, cutting, cutting and cutting. So now it's actually a reasonable like 500. So twice, twice what I expected. But you know, it's such an interesting process. The research never stops. I mean, even now, somebody will mention to me a book that I did not read in the course of my research. I mean, you know, I am not a Civil War scholar. I came to the Civil War, as I was explaining earlier, as a pretty much as an ingenue, you know, new to the whole thing. thing, relatively new, beyond a working knowledge.

And there's just so much. I came across the same situation when I wrote my book about Churchill, The Splendid and the Vile, and I disciplined myself to say, look, even if I tried to read everything that had ever been written about Churchill, I would not succeed because every year there are thousands more pages of material written about Churchill. Same with this period. Every year, X number of books more about Lincoln, about the Civil War. Yeah. You know, aspects.

And you can't read it all. So what you do, what I do, I isolate certain pivotal sources. My immunology is, you know is Lincoln biography by David Donald. One book that was done about for something in the 50s called First Blood. I isolate the massive diary by Edmund Ruffin, who's a key character in the book. I isolate these key sources. It'd be great to try to read every single biography ever done on Abraham Lincoln. But I'm not going to do it. Then I would never write anything because I've

spent the rest of my life reading about that. Yeah, actually, this is a problem. This is a thing that you can easily get into. And actually, it's a problem that is abetted by online sources, actually. And this is why I always, in the past, have tended to avoid digital online research. Because it can leave you feeling like, you know, it's almost as though you have turned on a fire hose. And it's just like, oh, there's no way I'm going to get on top of this. There's no way I'm going to get ahead of this. Which is why my typical MO had been to jump into an archive right away and just see for myself first, before I start reading things,

what's interesting, what's there. And I actually think that my superpower in the case of this book and in previous books is that I did come in as a neophyte, as someone with a certain amount of knowledge, but not this deep, rich knowledge that might have come if I had gotten my PhD on Abraham Lincoln. I come in fresh. I see things that appeal to me. I see a joke that Lincoln tells them like, oh, man, that's charming. Or the fact that he can't spell the word inauguration. God, that's charming.

I love that, you know. So these are the things that are in the foreground in my books that maybe another scholar would feel were too transient. There's a character in my book that I think is my favorite character, is a female diarist, Mary Chestnut. That's a name that is well known to any scholar of the Civil War. But typically, Mary Chestnut's diary is quoted in passing. She is treated as an observer who comments on action underway that the boys are otherwise engaging in.

And I wanted to bring Mary Chestnut forward as a living and breathing character to sort of capture the fact that while all this was going on, life was being led throughout America. It was not just about secession, about South Carolina, about these crazy people. It was about life being led and what Southern life was like. And Mary Chestnut is an amazing observer because she's just a really acute observer. And she was not wholeheartedly into slavery. She was not wholeheartedly against it. She was deeply conflicted. But she was also a lovely raconteur.

I mean, there's this constant sort of social world in Charleston. People were constantly visiting each other, going off on carriage trips. One day she goes to visit a cemetery with several friends. And cemeteries back in the day were not just gloomy places where dead people were. They were places where you could go and you could have picnics. You would stroll. They were recreational places as much as anything else. So they go to the cemetery.

They were recreational places as much as anything else. So they go to the cemetery, and one of the women she's with, one of her relatives is buried in a tomb that has a glass window. So you can see in to this embalmed body. I was like, really? Seriously? So that's in the book. Yeah.

Yeah, very good. But they really sort of added to the sense of darkness, the evolving darkness in this story. And it really, really sucked the life out of that particular day for Mary Cheston. I love Mary Cheston. I'd like to take her to dinner. Yeah, because embalming was, like, becoming really popular during the Civil War. Good thing, right? Yeah.

Becoming really popular. And they would try to sell soldiers like a package in advance where you could like prepay for your embalming if something happened to you so that your body would be able to be returned home to your family. And they wouldn't just leave you. I didn't even know that. I wish I'd known. I would put it in my book. Actually, my book predates the actual, Walt Whitman said, my book predates the real war. I mean, I bring it up to the Fort Sumter and the day or two after, which is when things really began to happen. And then fast forward through the war to the

epilogue and so forth. But yeah, that's a good detail. I like that. These are the kinds of things that I'd have a conversation with somebody and then I'd be like, but I wish that was in my book. Like it just never ends. It never ends, Eric. I know it does. It never does. No, it never does. I'm sure as I go out on this book tour, people will be telling me things that I sure wish I had known.

Oh, yeah. I know. But there has to be a stopping point. And sometimes like the genius of an author like you is knowing when the point comes to stop. Some people don't know. Some people write books that are 1500 pages long that nobody actually reads because they're too long and they just don't ever know where to stop. Some people don't go far enough and they don't include those sort of like interesting details about like her relative was in a glass tomb and you just see their embalmed body in there and it was real weird. So one of your unique zones of genius, I think, is figuring out how to include enough detail to make the story jump off the page, but not to overwhelm their reader so much that the book becomes just a doorstop that nobody has the courage to work through. Well, thank you. But I think that cuts back to actually the essence of that initial book of documents that I told you about. That's the spine. I like to think in terms of a Christmas tree. I

have a central narrative. That's the tree, right? Then the fun part comes and I get to hang the ornaments on that tree. And the trick is, you don't want to hang too many ornaments that the tree, you know, it just falls over. But my approach is, and this is why the book got up to like close to 800 pages, is to throw it all on the tree, throw it all on the tree and then start to take it away. And my long suffering wife, I think I mentioned this in the past, is she is my secret weapon because she's an excellent natural reader and editor. She is the audience for this book.

She would never on her own read a book about the Civil War. She would never on her own read a book about the Civil War. But maybe, you know, like others, maybe they'll take a chance because they like my other books, right? But she doesn't because, of course, she's married to me and she doesn't read this and we're all going to be unhappy. But so she reads this thing and it's very clear what works and what doesn't. Up arrows, down arrows, and so forth. Parts that are boring, long receding series of Zs, all these are margin symbols. She doesn't tell me, but if it's all in the margins, all the things that can stay should go, smiley faces, sad faces, the whole deal. That's gold. You're so right. Especially somebody that you trust has your best interest at heart.

You know, your success is her success in terms of like your shared relationship. She's not approaching this from a position of jealousy of like, I want to secretly make his book a little bit worse so that mine looks a little bit better. It's very important for all the writers out there to know who you can trust with your work. I love that term frenemy. There are people you can give a book to read and they can be very destructive. And I've learned that over time. So I totally trust my wife though, and my editor and my publicist, who is a great judge also. Yeah, you're absolutely right that the wrong feedback given in the wrong spirit, or you take it in the wrong frame of mind, and you're like, well, just burn it all to the ground then. Forget

it. Sorry, I wrote this terrible book. I'm sorry, I gave it to you. Yeah. My apologies. Who do you hope picks this book up? Of course, there's going to be the Eric Larson fan, the person who you've already established that relationship, that add-to-cart relationship with. Of course, there's that audience. But who do you hope passes by Demon of Unrest and picks it up? And what do you hope that they sort of like took into their pocket when they're done reading it? Well, again, the audience that I write for, the audience that I have in my mind as I'm writing a book is basically the audience as represented by my wife. Somebody who loves books, reads a wide array of books, and who I'm trying to appeal to on an emotional level.

So my goal is for people, again, who would never read a book about the Civil War, to come to my book and say, well, okay, this guy's got a decent track record. I'm going to give this book a shot and then I want them to walk through that portal into that book and sink so deeply into the past that when they emerge they feel like they've lived another another life now that's a big goal but I think it will happen with this book for for some people I mean I've been told by one in particular she just had to said, I just had to sit there for a while crying and just process what I had just read. And that to me was like, oh, wow, that's, that's interesting. Better than, not better, but I mean, I didn't exactly intend that, but I'm glad I had that power. hope the reader takes away? What is your, you know, you mentioned you're like, have this Christmas tree, your central thesis that you are building the book around. What is it that you hope the reader walks away having learned or experienced? Yeah, well, you know, there's no, I did not write it to convey a message. I did not write it to have a particular resonance with the era. It just

happens that it does. But I guess if there is a message that perhaps readers will carry away, if I can sort of restate it, is when people talk about radical things, take them seriously. Take them seriously. Don't dismiss this. Take them seriously. It's like another way to look at it is the inconceivable is always conceivable to someone. And that's kind of the cardinal message of this. I love that. What advice would you have for an aspiring writer? What advice would you have to somebody who either wants to write or maybe whose first book is coming out soon? Well, two different things. I mean, somebody's first book is coming

out soon. Mazel Tov. You've already crossed the Rubicon to an extent. You're only in the whatever circle of hell. More to come, but you've advanced beyond. My best advice, I was telling you this earlier, and it is, I think, I think it is the single best piece of advice I could ever give to anyone. And that is this idea of when you write, don't binge write. End at a point where you can begin the next day. End in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, so you can begin the next day, end in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, so you can start the next day. Even though you're tempted to keep going, even though you know you've got 10 more pages in you that day, don't do it. Start over the next day. And that's the best thing you can do. It's such interesting advice. I just want to go as far as I can.

I just want to be like, I got it all done. I felt so good to get so much done. Yeah. But the problem is you got to wake up the next morning. And that's the thing that stops writers. That's the thing that causes so-called writer's block is binging to the point where you say, oh my God, I had the most successful day. You pour yourself a cocktail and you sit down and you watch Succession for the rest of the night. your alarm goes off at 5 a.m. and you're like, oh man. I got nothing. I got nothing. Exactly.

Nothing. I got nothing. And that cocktail kept me up all night. I got no sleep. Exactly. Well, I have absolutely zero. I mean, you don't need my luck. You don't need my good luck wishes, but I'll give them to you anyway, of course. Thank you.

You truly are a remarkable writer. You truly are. Thank you. And it's always a pleasure to read whatever project you have decided is worthy of your time and attention. I know what will be worthy of my time and attention. That's how I feel about it. So congrats on that. I'm so excited to see the demon of unrest at all the airports on my book tour. The airports really love you, Eric. I just wish I loved airports. I know. I hate airports. Well, no, I mean, I'm an anxious I know. I hate airports.

Well, no, I mean, I'm an anxious flyer, so that's what makes book tours particularly, you know, difficult. I fully relate. I fully relate. My friends who like airports, I'm like, but why? What about this is enjoyable? None. Zero percent. I know.

I feel the same way. Much rather just be at home. I don't understand what's fun about this place. I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. Anyway, my point is, literally every airport bookstore, when you have a new book out, every airport bookstore is like, it's like a pyramid of Eric Larson books in the window. There's something about that business traveler. It was time to stop in the bookstore that loves an Eric Larson book, truly.

I hope you're right. Thank you so much for being here today. Always great to chat. Thank you, Sharon. Yeah, likewise. Likewise. My pleasure to have you and we will talk again soon. I hope so. Thank you. Thanks, Eric. Good luck. You can buy The Demon

of Unrest wherever you get your books. Or if you want to support local bookstores, you can go to bookshop.org. Thanks for being here today. This episode is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. Our production assistant is Andrea Shampo. And if you liked this episode, we would love to have you share it to social media or to leave us a rating or review. All

of those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here and we'll see you again soon.