Originally aired on June 26, 1998 - In part 200 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the fierce Southern loyalist, Edmund Ruffin. Legend has it that he fired the first shot at the Battle of Fort Sumter.
#200 – Edmund Ruffin
He was a forward-thinking planter and publisher far ahead of his time. He became Virginia’s answer to the fire-eating Rhett of South Carolina and Yancey of Alabama. A fierce Southern partisan who hated everything about the North, he was the Old Dominion’s leading slave defender and secessionist. His name was Edmund Ruffin.
Born in 1794 to a prominent family Ruffin early became the pre-eminent agricultural reformer in the antebellum South. In 1833, he founded the Farmer’s Register, a monthly journal that one historian termed “the best publication on agriculture which the country or Europe has ever produced”.
Ruffin next acquired a large expanse of land on the Pamunkey River and transformed it into a model estate. His use of marl, a shell-like deposit that neutralizes soil acidity plus his path breaking theories on crop rotation offered new life to American farmers. Yet Ruffin’s propositions went largely unheeded. Disgusted he abandoned agricultural enterprises in the mid-1850’s and turned to politics.
The grim, humorless Virginian was an unbending defender of slavery. Black bondage, he argued, yielded enormous economic and cultural benefits as well as firm control of the huge black population. Ironically as time would show and Ruffin never saw it was slavery that underlay the agricultural failures of the south. Slavery blocked the very reforms designed to defend and develop Southern farming.
Ruffin’s intense racism led easily to the cause of dis-union. The slave system was the cornerstone of Southern society. “It was in jeopardy”, Ruffin shouted, “inside a Union dominated by abolitionists and other fanatics”. He became a one-man crusader despite his lack of oratorical skills and political influence. In hotel lobbies, on steamboats and street corners throughout the south Ruffin argued for sectional independence. Despite his labors, Ruffin had little effect on the course of secession.
John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry set the old man into a frenzy. Ruffin was able to pull enough strings in order to witness the execution of the militant abolitionist. The next year South Carolina left the Union. When Virginia failed to follow suit quickly, Ruffin renounced his Virginia citizenship and moved the Charleston.
Legend, not fact, has it that Ruffin fired the first shot in the bombardment of Fort Sumter. A photograph taken at the time showed an old man, white hair hanging to his soldiers, tall, slender, straight as an Indian, a musket in one hand and a carpetbag in the other.
The aging fire-eater served in a South Carolina battery at the opening Battle of Manassas. He sought to get soldiers to see him as an inspiration. Instead they viewed him as an ornament. Infirmities of old age soon plagued Ruffin. He was reduced to the role of a passive observer in the Civil War he helped to create.
Union soldiers pillaged his properties. Ruffin became an exile and settled on a small farm in Amelia County. The more the military situation deteriorated for the South, the more embittered Ruffin became. When the Confederacy ceased to exist Ruffin no longer had reason to live.
Despondent over the deaths of family members, six of his nine children perished within a decade, and disturbed by physical ailments the seventy-one year old Ruffin carefully planned his end. On June 17, 1865, he wrote in his copious journal, “I have declared my unmitigated hatred of the perfidious, malignant, and vile Yankee race.” Then Ruffin seated himself in a chair placed the muzzle of a musket in his mouth and used a hickory stick to pull the trigger. The gun fired on the second attempt. The old man at last found peace.