Edmund Ruffin

Antebellum life

Ruffin was born on January 5th, 1794, at Evergreen Plantation just east of Hopewell in Prince George County, Virginia. He was born into Virginia's planter class aristocracy and inherited large tracts of land along the James River. Ruffin served as a private in the Virginia Militia during the War of 1812, but did not see battle. In 1813, he married Susan Hutchings Travis of Williamsburg; the couple moved to a farm Ruffin inherited from his grandfather, at Coggin's Point, along the James River in Prince George County. They had eleven children before Susan Ruffin died in 1846.

In his twenties, Ruffin began experimenting with using marl to rejuvenate the soil on his land that had been worn out by more than a century of tobacco monoculture. In 1843, he purchased another plantation, Marlbourne, in Hanover County near Richmond, in the Virginia Tidewater. The land had long been cultivated for tobacco, and finding the soil exhausted, he became a serious agronomist who helped revolutionize Southern agriculture. He was a pioneer in promoting conservation and soil rejuvenation.

He became one of a circle of intellectuals who worked for reformation of various aspects of the South. His colleagues included Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, George Frederick Holmes, James Henry Hammond, and William Gilmore Simms. Their interests spanned Southern society, and they promoted stewardship as a justification for slavery, influenced by the evangelical tradition that generated reform in the North as well. They published their recommendations and "jeremiads" in short-lived periodicals and felt unjustly neglected by fellow Southerners.

For a time in the 1840s, Ruffin was editor of the Farmers Register. He did serious studies of the possibility of using lime to raise pH in peat soils. Ruffin presented a paper, later expanded into an article for American Farmer and eventually into the highly influential book An Essay on Calcareous Manures (1852). He explained how applications of calcareous earths (marl) had reduced soil acidity and improved yields of mixed crops of corn and wheat on his land, which had been worn out by two centuries of tobacco farming. These works and others have led to his being called the "father of soil science" in modern times.

During the pre-war years, Ruffin also studied the origin of bogs and published several detailed descriptions of the Dismal and Blackwater swamps in Virginia. Ruffin would later be better known for his substantive contributions to agriculture rather than his claim to have fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. His advice on the value of marl was not widely followed in his own time. In an 1852 address, he warned planters that not paying attention to their soil could lead to ruin, and the South did suffer from exhausted soils in the postwar years.

Political activism

Ruffin was a strong supporter of slavery and the Southern way of life. He became increasingly outspoken as sectional hostilities heightened in the 1850s, and was known as one of the Fire-Eaters who contributed to the start of the Civil War. He urged secession years before the war. Noting how his audience had changed, he wrote in his diary in January 1859, "I have had more notice taken on my late pamphlet [on slavery] than on anything I ever wrote before."

In 1859, Ruffin traveled to attend the execution of John Brown at Charles Town, Virginia (later West Virginia), following the abolitionist's abortive slave revolt at Harper's Ferry earlier that year. To gain access to the event, Ruffin joined the Virginia Military Institute cadet corps and, donning a borrowed overcoat and carrying arms, the aging, white-haired secessionist marched into Charles Town with the young cadets who had been ordered up from Lexington.

Ruffin purchased several of the pikes captured from Brown and his forces, which had been intended to arm slaves in a general uprising. Ruffin sent a pike to each of the governors of the slave-holding states as proof of violent Northern enmity against the South and slavery.

In 1860, Ruffin published his book, Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. Written in the form of letters to the London Times from 1864 to 1870 from a fictional English resident in the United States, he played out the result of the election of Republican candidates in the United States. He predicted an American civil war in 1868 following the re-election of President William H. Seward, which would ultimately result in a victory for Southern states. Although most of his predictions were wrong, Ruffin did correctly predict that the war would start with a Southern attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

Civil War

After the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, Ruffin traveled to South Carolina, where he had previously worked as an agronomist, hoping to encourage secession (perhaps because, as Swanberg says, his fellow Virginians found his views too extreme). He wrote to his son, "The time since I have been here has been the happiest of my life." Ruffin is credited with firing one of the first shots from Morris Island against the federally held Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, which is generally considered the military event that initiated the war; the actual first shot against Fort Sumter was likely a signal shot from Fort Johnson under the command of Captain George S. James. Ruffin was also the first person to enter Fort Sumter after it fell to Southern forces.

During the Civil War, with Union forces threatening Richmond, Ruffin left Marlbourne for Beechwood, the Prince George County home of his son, Edmund Ruffin Jr. In June 1864, after the Army of the Potomac under General Ulysses S. Grant stealthily crossed the James River into Prince George over a pontoon bridge a few miles east of Beechwood, Ruffin allegedly escaped by hiding under a load of hay in a wagon driven by one of his slaves. He fled west to the relative safety of another son's home in Confederate-held territory west of Petersburg. Several of Ruffin's plantations were occupied and plundered by Union forces during the war. His plantation on Coggins Point was the scene of the Beefsteak Raid during the Siege of Petersburg. When the war ended with Confederate defeat, Ruffin, who had already suffered the loss of his wife and eight of his children, was crushed. Increasingly despondent after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in 1865, along with the other surrenders that were to follow, Ruffin decided to commit suicide. On June 18, 1865, while staying with his son and daughter-in-law at Redmoor in Amelia County, Ruffin went up to his study with a rifle and a forked stick. He was called away to greet visitors at the front door.

After they left, Ruffin returned to write a final diary entry:

And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will [be] near to my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.

Ruffin put the rifle muzzle in his mouth and used the forked stick to manipulate the trigger. The percussion cap went off without firing the rifle, and the noise alerted Ruffin's daughter-in-law. But by the time she and his son reached his room, Ruffin had reloaded the rifle and fired a fatal shot. His body was returned to Marlbourne, his plantation in Hanover County, Virginia, for burial.

Legacy and honors

He is often called the "father of soil science" in the United States, and his writings have been influential in soil conservation.

The Edmund Ruffin Plantation, also known as Marlbourne, is designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Works