Madness Rules the Hour

Charleston, 1860, and the Mania for War

By: Paul Starobin

Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell

From Lincoln's election to secession from the Union, this compelling history explains how South Carolina was swept into a cultural crisis at the heart of the Civil War.

"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 decision: 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.

©2017 Paul Starobin (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"'Madness Rules the Hour,' Paul Starobin's fast-paced, engagingly written account of the hysteria that descended on lovely Charleston—where the unthinkable became the inevitable—is as much a study in group psychology as it is in history...The conductors of this movement were the city's elite, whom Starobin presents in finely drawn portraits."—New York Times Book Review

"[A] gripping new narrative history...[a] bracing, seamlessly narrated account of the hysterical events in Charleston in 1860..."—Washington Times

"A dramatic and engaging addition to Civil War studies that serves as a fitting bookend paired with Jay Winik's account of the end of the war, April 1865 (2001)."—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

Madness Rules The Hour ...once more

Wonderfully written.

This book describes what happens when reason is abandoned. The citizens of Charleston in 1860 are not unlike QAnon followers and Trumpsters of today. Madness Rules the Hour once again.

Captivating!

As someone who paid poor attention to US history in grade school, especially the history of a city in a state other than my own, I should not have been surprised by how much I didn’t know about Charleston’s role in the civil war. This story has prompted me to learn more. A very enjoyable performance and a richly detail history.

Gluttons for violent self-righteousness

Narration is clear.

History shows that the South gleefully promoted a war not thrust upon it, and, as is documented in this book, Charleston’s leaders played a pivotal roll in promoting the States Rights red herring.

Excellent

This was an intriguing examination of Charleston and its key personalities during the ramp up to the Civil War. The story was well organized and the narration was very good as well. If you are interested in Charleston or the Civil War, this is a must read book.

Secession as you’ve never heard it before

Paul Starobin’s Madness Rules the Hour is an open love letter to Charleston, the most defiant city in America, and perhaps all the world, at the moment of its greatest triumph. Starobin weaves together primary sources, character studies, and a swift narrative to create a sense of the passions and politics driving Charleston to secede from a dysfunctional, weaponized, Union.

Among the passions, first and foremost was pure defiance - the life’s blood of the American South - which drove many with no skin in the slavery game besides being told that it, and southern society, was evil, to push harder for secession than most planters.

These working class whites, perhaps surprisingly, were also the driving force of the politics of secession, often using their roles in local militias to promote the lofty ideals of Charleston’s independence.

In positioning the working class whites at the center of secession, Starobin upends the long held assumption that political disunion was driven by a planter aristocracy to the detriment of the classes beneath it. Starobin allows us to see that class is one thing, but type is altogether another; and class interests only trump others for mercenary, non-noble types. For defiant Southern whites, what mattered was not having to answer to New England abolitionist elites, John Brown’s ghost, or similarly vengeful politicians.

Perfectly narrated by Kevin Stillwell, Madness Rules the Hour earns a spot on any shelf or list of books on Southern and militia history. This is no paean to a lost cause but to one very much alive in today’s South. How Charleston managed to lead the Deep South out of a Union hell bent on it’s destruction might not be relevant as a contemporary political primer, but the Palmetto City will always be a beacon for the defiant, sunny South.