Larson brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.
A concentrated focus ... Perhaps no other historian has ever rendered the struggle for Sumter in such authoritative detail as Larson does here ... Even in his portrayals of the White elite, Larson makes puzzling choices. Very early in the book, he devotes more than 30 pages to the prewar life of a loathsome planter turned senator, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, seeming to set him up as one of the narrative’s major characters. But then Hammond largely disappears ... The portrait of Anderson is Larson at his best.
Larson’s first book on the Civil War. And his green horns show ... Almost drowned from exertion, especially in the incredibly banal final stretch. And still there was something lacking in the book’s 565 pages: Nary a Black person, free or enslaved, is presented as more than a fleeting, one-dimensional figure ... A swaggering disregard for the difference between the shopworn and the truly complex that leads straight into the pitfalls of nostalgia and hubris.
I wish Demon told us more about Black people of the time. There are references to enslaved men fighting for the South and about others fleeing plantations, but their untold stories will have to wait for another book.
