'We're all Americans'

Lawn signs sprout in a tense election; coping with the Civil War echoes

In “The Demon of Unrest,” Erik Larson quotes a letter sent early in 1861 by James Hammond, the secessionist former US senator from South Carolina, to a friend from New York who opposed slavery. So strong were Hammond’s sentiments that Larson calls it “a miracle” that his letter “did not ignite the stationery upon which it was written.”

 The former senator observed, “I am sick of the subject and feel now as we all do more disposed to fight it out than to argue any more.”

“You think our system an evil — a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last. We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours — at least for us — in all respects.”

“Can you not let us alone?”

The passage encapsulates the way the opposing sides viewed slavery, the central moral issue that drove the United States toward civil war. A live-and-let-live approac…