Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War

by Paul Starobin

-The tea has been thrown overboard-the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.- --Charleston Mercury, November 8, 1860
In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a climactic they could submit to abolition--or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow.
In Madness Rules the Hour, Paul Starobin tells the story of how Charleston succumbed to a fever for war and charts the contagion's relentless progress and bizarre turns. In doing so, he examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants and their wives and daughters, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who waged a violent and exuberant revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence. They devoured the Mercury, the incendiary newspaper run by a fanatical father and son; made holy the deceased John C. Calhoun; and adopted -Le Marseillaise- as a rebellious anthem. Madness Rules the Hour is a portrait of a culture in crisis and an insightful investigation into the folly that fractured the Union and started the Civil War.

Genres: History, Civil War, American History, Nonfiction, American Civil War, Politics, Psychology

297 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2017

Reviews

[Bfisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3-1/2 stars

I can recall reading Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury in the early 1970's, which started with his vivid description of the split at the Charleston DNC National Convention of 1860 as the final trigger for the secession of South Carolina in 1860. While a great description of the events at the Charleston convention, Catton's book did not provide much detail on what happened between the April, 1860 convention and the actual secession ordinance of December, 1860.

This book neatly fills that gap, describing the organized and unorganized forces and leading characters who grasped the opportunity of Abraham Lincoln's election to accomplish South Carolina's secession.

[Caleb J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike so many Civil war books this book is narrowly focused on 1860 Charleston, South Carolina and a small cast of characters who embodied the southern narrative of property rights and the overreach of Federal government. It succeeds in presenting the tone and mood of the months and days leading up to Lincoln's election and before he was inaugurated 4 months later. In this time, from their perspective, Lincoln was the Devil, coming to destroy their adherence to their southern ways of subjugation. They interpreted the constitution as supporting their property rights of black ownership. It was a religion of sorts and Lincoln was the Devil denier. The history is facinating and pertinent to our lives today in so many ways. Well done and worthwhile though I imagine it is beneficial to have a basic amount of Civil war knowledge to bring forth a stronger appreciation of this focused work.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

" 'Men, it has well been said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one' "

The idea of South Carolina striking out on its own wasn't a new one. During the nullification crisis of 1832 many had advocated for it. In subsequent years South Carolina had revisited the idea after perceived Northern aggression toward their "peculiar institution" of slavery. But by 1860 a core of men who had been at the forefront of what was once seen as a fringe movement, saw their chance. Based primarily in Charleston, they blanketed the city with secessionist pamphlets, marches, speeches, and friendly newspaper reporting as well as actively trying to sabotage their own party's presidential candidate. The latter was done in hopes of getting an abolitionist Republican as president and highlighting the threat to the South that could only be relieved by secession.
That this small group of men could accomplish all of this within the course of a year and barely 9 months into Lincoln's first term is the astonishing story of this book.
The author makes an excellent case that while secession was something always boiling under the surface there was no widespread movement toward it until this small group of wealthy slaveholders and government officials launched what could only be called a public relations campaign to not only secede, but do it in a breathtakingly short amount of time for fear that the public may lose their nerve.
This is as much a story of mob mentality and manipulation as much as it is secession. Men with outsized egos and with little concern for what they would be unleashing, propelled their state and the others who followed them, headfirst into tragedy and destruction.
South Carolina, and Charleston in particular, was as one of the few prominent Unionists in the city put it "too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum".

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this tale of how consummating the triumph of "state's rights" went from being a pipe dream, to a nightmare come to life, to be downright fascinating, and it takes a lot these days to impress me in a book dealing with the period. To a certain degree this is a "press lord" version of the story, as Starobin spends a good bit of time dwelling on the Rhett family, the owners of the Charleston "Mercury," one the foremost fountains of secessionist spirit. However, the real guts of the book is how the Democrats' national convention, held in Charleston in the hope of demonstrating the good will of the national leadership, was torpedoed in the hopes of facilitating the break-up of the union, and how events deteriorated from there. It then becomes a tale of how a social elite, who sought to preserve what they saw as their rightful place in society, accelerated its destruction.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe a NYTimes book review brought this title to my attention, and having just read a volume on the Siege and Commune of Paris, thought this would be a good title to follow that with. (Given the times, I'm now reading Hill's edition of Elihu Washburne during the Siege and Commune, intend to follow that with Miéville's history of the Bolshevik Revolution (October), and then probably 1861 by Adam Goodheart.) I am quite well read on the Civil War, and the run-up to it, and felt that this did a very good job.

Rather in the mode of some of Robert K. Massie's histories, the book follows a timeline of events, but the chapters are often a succession of mini-biographies of the cast of characters. They include the agitators for secession, the resistors, free blacks, displaced Northerners, officers in the US Army garrison, and so on.

The main thing I learned from this text is why South Carolina, and then several other states, decided to secede on the event of Lincoln's election, rather than in response to some provocation. It seems that the main agitators for secession invented a Republican Presidential victory, regardless of candidate, as a trigger for secession, and then actively sabotaged the Democrats in order to produce that Republican victory. This sounds like conspiracy theory, but the documentation is clear, and was not even hidden. The idea was to make sure the incoming administration wouldn't have a chance to negotiate or temporize, because the secessionists 'mistrusted their own people more than they feared all of the efforts of the Abolitionists.' The election was, in other words, an invented provocation.

The book is good at pointing out the immediate negative repercussions that the secession agitation and actual votes had on the city that was claiming the future would be all rosy, and in the Aftermath section it briefly describes the ruin of the place after the War. One of the themes that reminded me of the American Revolution is that there were quite a number of leaders of the revolutionary party who had massive debts owed to the group the revolution would be against. Most of those wealthy cotton plantation owners in South Carolina were indebted to banks and merchants in the North. Hmmm.

The book is also very good at sketching out the interior tensions in South Carolina's society. Between slaveowners and non-slaveowners; between white tradesmen and the whole institution of slave labor, as well as against free blacks; between plantation owners and merchants and industrialists; between fire-eaters (folks who wanted the state to secede ASAP and by itself) and Cooperationists (folks who wanted the slave states to go out as a bloc).

I was unhappy to see no follow-up to the story of the Johnsons, free black tailors, in the Aftermath chapter. There are other books where I can get that story, but it was left as a hanging thread in this one.

This volume is quite readable, informative and enlightening. Recommended.

[Elizabeth Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm glad I revisited this; I got even more out of it the second time. Vividly and powerfully written. I love that Starobin focuses on individuals, including a female abolitionist and a free black family.

[Dave Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than I'd hoped for
When I pick up a book I have hopes and expectations. With non fiction books I often have a few specific questions in mind. I really love it when I learn something that I didn't know that I didn't know. The absolute gold standard is when that book contains a "Missing piece" of information that clicks with what I already knew and everything makes way more sense.
This is one of the Gold Standard books. This answered questions I'd had and answered questions I hadn't even thought to ask.
This book was a joy to read and I feel like I have a much better grasp on more than this book was about.
Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War as you can read in the blurb and other reviews is set in a more focused time and location than any other history book about that era that I've come across, and therefore perfect for what I really wanted. The WHY of it.
I don't care how many cannons where at the battle of Joe's knee, or what general Filibuster said before the cavalry charge, I want to know WHY these guys are fighting and WHAT they think they are fighting for. That is the hardest thing for me find in history books, and from a wide view it's impossible to answer. So here we have a close up view with surviving documents from some of the instigators. The architects of their little corner of the secession were not shy about saying why, and saying it so many ways that even the unconscious assumptions and motivations start to peek out.
-Two things really struck me about this book.
The parallels between the slave state secessionists of 1860 and the white right neoconservative movement of today are staggering. I've heard the comparison made so many times that it's practically boilerplate, but WOW! The same hysteria and misinformation. the same inflation and invention of aggrievement. The same existential dread that if their throne were one inch shorter or their crown had one less jewel it would be the end of the world and all light and goodness. The same conspiracy theories, the same sad sad betrayal of the working classes, the same pitting poor against poor so that those who live like kings could live like emperors.
The second thing (I just can't get over this) is the language the secessionists used to express their grievance. They compared their treatment to SLAVERY! To bondage, to subjugation. They expressed how intolerable it was to even imagine oneself in that condition. They used the language of emancipation and liberation to describe breaking the union. To break their chains and free themselves of the bonds of humiliation. -the shear bald face hypocrisy to demand the arrest and lynching of anyone who said the slavery was wrong or evil and in the same breath use that outlawed language to describe indignities they would not stand for.
There is so much more to this book but, those two alone were worth the price of admission.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Southern whites were convinced in 1860 that if the North wouldn't protect their right to take slaves into free states and territories, they were being oppressed. But what to do about it? In Charleston, some firebrands wanted South Carolina to secede ASAP; others wanted the South to secede as a block; others wanted to work within the system. Starobin shows how the firebrands won out, blithely convinced that their economy wouldn't suffer and the British Empire would support them, even if they reopened the African slave trade.
Starobin focuses a lot on individuals: the firebrand editor of the Charleston Mercury newspaper, free blacks who saw themselves treated as potential fifth columnists, the sensible centrists losing ground and so on.

[Jeff Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the surface this book is a compelling, multi-faceted narrative of the reasons that drove the South into the Civil War, but underneath is an essential revelation: a Genesis of the origins of the deeply embedded resentments that evolved over the intervening 150 years to now drive conservative Middle America, resentments that have been the common bond for Republicans from Reagan to Trump, the casus belli for the Cold Civil War we are in now. This should be required reading for every American.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm tempted to give this five stars but i'm feeling stingy this morning

super interesting, really funny, and awesome to read while living in charleston.

offered a lot of perspective about the role of slavery in the civil war and particularly in charleston. this book is the info i've beens seeking about charleston for a while.

overall, really enjoyed it. learned stuff. laughed a little. good stuff

[Christina Lear · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book uses pre Civil War Charleston to explore how media and parades and sermons and other tools of populism can quickly shift the political winds and allow fervor to take over reason. Kind of hard to keep track of all the white men who star in this book but I enjoyed reading such a place-specific history after having visited Charleston.

[Becky Loader · Rating 4 out of 5]

1860 in Charleston was a time of heightened hysteria and a driving lust for war. Secession was the ultimate goal,, and people were caught up in the emotional turmoil of threats to their way of life. Riveting and well researched.

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent re-examination of Charleston, South Carolina's rush to war in 1860, with many lessons for new generations. Starobin details how the secession movement began from uncertain steps led by maximalist "fire-eaters" uninterested in bi-partisan consensus, dedicated to ramming through - by mobilizing mob frenzy - their single-minded vision of a Southern Republic in South Carolina, serving as the vanguard of a Southern Confederacy. It took a year of agitation to take an "appealing idea" into the halls of power as a reality, overcoming the last scruples of those reluctant to make a final break. Notable also was the reluctance of other Deep South sympathizers in other states to themselves take the first plunge. South Carolina had traditionally been Virgina's competitor as spokesman for the South, always taking the extremist position from the earliest days of the slave system. Now John C. Calhoun would at last triumph over Washington and Jefferson.

Starobin's meticulous account, and biographies of leading Charlestonians, makes it quite clear that slavery was indeed the root cause of states' rights and disunion. Not for likes of the Rhetts, Sr. and Jr., or Townsend, or Magrath, or the Gourdin brothers were such post-facto rationalizations as the "civil war wasn't really about slavery." They openly justified defense of slavery as a sacred institution to be preserved by war if required.

Starobin does probe into the deepest cause for secession's victory in 1860 that made another Compromise of 1850 impossible: the planters' debts, in arrears more than ever to New York banks and merchants after the crash of '57. On p. 134 he recounts a planter, when asked "Why do you wish to get out?" who replied: "Most of us planters are deeply in debt; we should not be if out of the Union." "Those debts would be suspended in the event of secession and 'obliterated forever' in the event of war. . . . 'It is they, the Northern people - the Northern creditors - who have driven us out of a union with them.' "

Success in this would of course have bankrupted Northern merchant houses, crashed New York banks, and disrupted supplies to the New England mills, throwing the national economy into a depression worse than anything then known. US financial solvency was thus at the root of national security in seeking, by flattery or war, to keep the South in the house. Without their "right" to expand to new markets, with new profits to satisfy old debts, the planters would indeed have faced ruin. An independent South could float new loans, trade directly with Europe, and even expand on its own elsewhere, to Cuba and beyond. Or so they hoped.

But South Carolinians knew, as Starobin examines repeatedly, that no state outside South Carolina - led by Charleston - would make the first move. It was up to up to the Charleston elite to strike the blow. And even then it would not be decisive, unless the Federal government could be manuevered into "attacking the South." Hence the need for "northern aggression" in Lincoln's decision to send warships to relieve Sumter. With the entire South symbolically "fired upon" in "pursuit of its just rights" the spark of secession could blaze in legislatures across Dixie. The ruins of Charleston by 1865, so vividly recounted in Starobin's conclusion, were of Ukrainian proportions.

The story's lessons go beyond the context of its time and place and should be a warning to all those who let imaginations run wild with brave talk and manly posturing. "The masses always suffer," a Charleston diarist summed after the war (p. 221.); stirred into flag-waving violence with knee-jerk rhetoric who return home with missing limbs, if they have homes left, or return at all.

[Chris Chester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked up this book after doing some reading on the question of whether the Civil War was an inevitability after the election of Lincoln or whether a series of decision points had to be crossed. There's still a number of different ways of tackling that question, but one of the biggest precipitating flash points appears historically to be South Carolina's decision to secede.

Starobin's book is an excellent text for exploring what led South Carolina to light the fuse of rebellion. I appreciated that Starobin doesn't try and get prescriptive with the answer, he presents the facts as he was able to compile them and sort of leaves it to the reader to decide.

You can certainly argue that there was a certain level of inevitability to the whole affair. The state already held the union in questionable regard. And the speed and willingness with which the population was whipped into a fervor suggests that conditions were ripe for something like this even outside the decisions of specific actors.

But Starobin also runs you through the roster of characters who were the pied pipers leading the common man down the road. Whether you're talking about the Rhett family that owned The Mercury, the Gourdins, the federal judge Magrath who would later become governor, they all strike the reader as rank opportunists who tried to use this political moment to work the levers of power for their own selfish purposes.

Were you able to go back in time and extinguish their ardor, would things have necessarily changed? I'm no believer in the Great Man theory of history. And in this case, it seems virtually certain that other opportunists would have stood up in their stead to leverage this simmering feeling for themselves.

It does sort of make you look twice at the political landscape today and the ways in which our current political class of opportunists work the levers for their own personal gain. Not a Napoleon among them!

This was a great supplementary read to other historic texts and I do recommend it.

[John Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

On page 188 at the bottom of the page James Petigru wrote to a friend "South Carolina is too small for a Republic, but too large for an insane asylum." which pretty much states this entire book.
Of course as it turned out the insanity spread all throughout the South and well we all know what happened to that plan.
I was reading this book as Mitch Landrieu was busy tearing down statues of...well common knowledge now. However it was interesting to go back in time and see where the noose was fashioned for the South to stick its collective neck in. No shock to me that South Carolina began the madness from the Nullification Crisis in 1832, it took Andy Jackson shut them down, there by saving the Union for almost thirty years. Something that Mitch might consider when he starts talking about taking down Old Andrew in Jackson Square.

A good book to see how the Civil War got its start.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Madness Rules the Hour is about a rarely talked of part of the Civil War: how, specifically, it came to happen. Placing the reader in Charlestown, South Carolina in the years immediately preceding the war, Madness Rules the Hour focuses the secession movement, introduces you to it's leaders and their backgrounds, and explains how those leaders deliberately cultivated anxiety and discontent into a force that would rend the United States and ultimately end up spilling almost as much American blood as of our other wars combined. This was an extraordinarily interesting and educational read and it is one that I would be happy to recommend.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I enjoyed "Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War" by Paul Starobin. The book is full of interesting facts and gives you a good feel for the war/secession mania in Charleston in particular and the south in general. And even though a lot of folks try to say secession was about states' rights, not slavery; this book sets the record straight. It was ALL about slavery. Full disclosure, I'm originally from Charleston (haven't lived there in a long time) so I recognize every place and many of the surnames of key individuals. It's a quick read (or listen) and I would recommend it for anyone with a special interest in this part of American history.

[Joseph J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quick and well written read into the secessionist hysteria which swept Charleston, S.C. leading to and following the election of Abraham Lincoln at the close of 1860. As a person born in S.C. I still live everyday the legacy of that time-slavery, secession and the war. I am one who often feels like a political and social alien in this state of my birth, which I have left and returned to many times. Especially in a time when Confederate statues and memorials are being questioned, the sectional burden is actually a national legacy. Be sure and read the description of the planning of the-now controversial and sometimes defaced-John C. Calhoun memorial in Charleston; no "Yankee" sculptor need apply!

[Gerry Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Madness Rules the Hour Paul Starobin writes of the triumph of secession fever in 1860 Charleston, S.C. Rhett's newspaper the Mercury ( a forerunner of today's Fox News) became a strident advocate for severing ties to the Union over the risk to slavery. It was all about slavery. Great account of how mass delusion can shape history. And Charleston paid the price four years later with devastation, ruin, disease and dire poverty.

[Doug Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

" Carthage must be destroyed." - Cato the Elder
" Anyone who is not satisfied with war should go and see Charleston. " - William T. Sherman.
Charleston led the South out of the Union and into destiny, infamy and ruin. This is the story of how it happened and what it was like in that city when it did.
Excellent read.

[Steve Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this history of Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, Starobin captures the atmosphere of intense feelings and maniacal passions of a city caught up in the secessionist movement. It is a vividly written story with all the elements of plot, character and action that you would find in a great novel. Rarely can one find an historical account that is a page-turner!

[Jim Upchurch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable civil war book

I've read a lot of civil war stuff over the years, but never a book that gave such a living and informative account of what it was like to see Charleston lead the South down the road of cultural and political insanity into secession and war. Remarkable.

[Straw · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the most uninteresting and simplistic books on the advent of the Civil War I have ever read. I can't help thinking the author was barely fleshing out a magazine article and turning it into a book.

[Barry L Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gone With the Wind

Although you know the result, Mr. Starobin's narrative succeeds in keeping the reader spellbound as Charleston rushes full throttle towards the destruction of all they hold dear. Enjoyable, rewarding historical fare.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating story about the role of Charleston, S.C. in fomenting the Civil War. A deep dive into the people of Charleston and their thoughts and actions before secession. Well-written and engaging.

[Mary Conway · Rating 3 out of 5]

It almost feels like a college paper - the thesis could be summed up much more quickly even if each detail reveals more and more how money and desire to maintain slavery propelled the South into the Civil War.

[David Shelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book on Charleston leading up to Secession and the Civil War. For a history book its very fast paced and easy to read. Most chapters are just a few pages and focus on a certain person or critical event. Definitely recommend.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good and useful history of the lead-up to Secession largely focused of Charleston and its environs. It’s meant for an educated non-specialist but historians will find a few anecdotes that might now know. For those interested in the history of the South, the Civil War, and literary Caroliniana.

[Daniel Farabaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very good read that did a very good job of chronicling the intentional steps toward secession in 1860 South Carolina. He does a good job of dissecting that this was not a spontaneous movement but a coordinated campaign and never loses sight of slavery as he central focus.

[Ronald Rufrano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding historical piece, makes the characters...good, bad, and ugly...come to life so vividly you think they're sitting in your living room. Excellent job of building the swirling storm and mob mentality that resulted in the greatest human tragedy in American history