Background
Edmund Ruffin was born in Prince George County, Va. , the son of George and Jane (Lucas) Ruffin.
( In this last of the three-volume printed edition of The...)
In this last of the three-volume printed edition of The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, the celebrated Virginia agricultural reformer and apostle of secession chronicles the increasingly melancholy events of the last two years of the Civil War and of his own life. Apart from one brief sojourn in Charleston, Edmund Ruffin spent the last two years of the war in Virginia. Failing health and the course of the war prevented the devout Confederate from traveling to important battle sites and recording events there firsthand as he had done in the earlier years of the war. Unable to move about, Ruffin nonetheless continued to follow the war closely and to keep a daily commentary on contemporary events. This commentary provides a remarkably dispassionate and astute analysis of the declining military fortunes of the Confederacy as well as an illuminating portrait of deteriorating conditions on the home front. Yet this final volume of Ruffin’s diary is more than a record of “first impressions of public events,” as Ruffin claimed. Ruffin comments on religion, race, class, and politics. The topics he discusses range from the controversy over the enrollment of black troops and the transition to free labor at war’s end to an extended discourse on de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As the final curtain fell on the Confederacy, the embittered southern nationalist, overwhelmed by physical maladies and familial misfortunes, resolved to take his own life. Only two months after Lee’s surrender to Grant, and less than fifty miles from Appomattox, Ruffin fired the last shot in his own private war against the Yankees―a bullet through his head. Rich in detail as well as in Ruffin’s personal beliefs, this carefully edited diary stands as one of the most valuable documents of the Civil War era.
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(Excerpt from Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Les...)
Excerpt from Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time: In the Form of Extracts of Letters From an English Resident in the United States, to the London Times, From 1864 to 1870 At this point of time, when the issue of a new election is just ascertained, and the second term of power of this new and rapidly-growing Republican or Abolition party is about to begin, it may be Of use to English readers to take a rap id glance over the more recent political events and tenden cies of this country - Of which the concerns, even when most important, are, by most Europeans, deemed of too little ao count to be carefully noticed, or to be long remembered. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Excerpt from Address to the Virginia State Agricultural S...)
Excerpt from Address to the Virginia State Agricultural Society: On the Effects of Domestic Slavery on the Manners, Habits and Welfare of the Agricultural Population of the Southern States; And the Slavery of Class to Class in the Northern States; Read at the First Annual Meeting, in the Hall of the House of Delegates The free labor system, if exclusively in operation from the beginning of a newly settled country (which, however, was not the case with Massachusetts or any of the older northern States,) would subj eet all employers and proprietors to great straits in the general scarcity and high price of free and hired labor. Hence, every economy of labor would be induced, and employers and proprietors would necessarily be themselves laborious, and frugal to the extent of parsimony. Their children, from an early age, would be trained to the industrious and frugal habits of their parents. N 0 available means for gain would be neglected, nor any expensive indulgence, be permitted. Such circumstances would per mit farming only on a small scale - se that the farmer, his wife, and sons and daughters, would constitute the greater number, if not all, of his permanent laborers and servants, for the farm or the house. Thus, every one is always at work, and helping to increase. Both private gains and the public wealth. But, on this account, none of the hard work ing rural population will have leisure for a high degree of mental culture, or for the im proving pleasures of extended social inter course. The very long and severe winters of Massachusetts, when scarcely any out door labor can be performed, more than any thing else, have permitted and invited every person to acquire the lowest branches of school instruction. But this benefit does not prevent a general and increasing want of higher and more useful knowledge, for ac quiring which the lower branches of school education are but the useful means. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(The centerpiece of this generously annotated book is the ...)
The centerpiece of this generously annotated book is the diary kept by the celebrated agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin during the eight months in 1843 when, at the request of Governor James Henry Hammond, he conducted an economic survey of South Carolina, traveling to every corner of the state to examine the different farming methods in use and the resources available for their improvement. Ruffin’s succinct and pointed narrative, driven by a passionate interest in the perpetuation of slavery, recaptures for the modern reader the physical and social environment of the Palmetto State two decades before the outbreak of the Civil War in the Charleston harbor.
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( In this second of a projected three-volume edition of T...)
In this second of a projected three-volume edition of The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, the fiery southern nationalist records the events of the first two years of the Civil War -- from the aftermath of Fort Sumter (where Ruffin fired the first shot) to the simultaneous disasters at Gettysburg and Vicksburg that spelled doom for the Confederacy.From his advantageous position as the resident and former owner of two Virginia plantations, Ruffin was able to write a vivid eyewitness account of the early Federal campaigns against Richmond. Both of the Ruffin homesteads, Marlbourne and Beechwood, were overrun during McClellan's Peninsular Campaign of 1862, and the journal contains interesting observations about the conduct of Virginia slaves during this campaign, as well as the change it engendered in master-slave relations. Also included is a remarkable recollection of the Nat Turner revolt.The day-to-day descriptions of the Civil War in Virginia are laced with illumination comments about civil and military leaders on both sides, the prospect of foreign intervention, the increasing strain upon the southern economy, the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the possibility of detaching the northwestern states from the East.Written by a man totally committed to the southern cause, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin is a literate, dependable source of information about the Civil War and its effects, as well as the political and social conditions in the South during the most critical period in its history. Meticulously edited by William Kauffman Scarborough, it will be of lasting value to anyone who wishes to study the Civil War from the insider's point of view.
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( History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native be...)
History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most aggressive "fire-eaters." This volume of Ruffin's work offers us his less known but equally intense passion for agricultural study. In carefully edited selections from Ruffin's writings, Jack Temple Kirby presents an innovative, progressive agronomist and pioneering conservationist. Arranged in sections discussing southern agricultural history, Ruffin's observations of nature, his ideas about land reform, and his plans for soil rejuvenation, Nature’s Management shows that Ruffin was a thinker far ahead of his time, recognizing our need to improve agriculture and to protect nature. Known as the "father of soil science" in the United States, Edmund Ruffin discovered and solved the problem of soil acidity while still in his twenties and published several papers on the subject. As the publication of his writing increased, Ruffin left his own farming business to pursue his studies. This volume contains a collection of Ruffin's essays on a variety of interrelated subjects. From the promotion of fencing and methods of malaria prevention to advocacy of a public works program and the recycling of waste, Ruffin's ideas paved the way for the early conservation movement associated with Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and others. Nature's Management presents Ruffin's activism and innovative genius at its best, replacing the image of a southern firebrand with that of an outspoken reformer deserving of recognition.
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(Athens 1988 University of Georgia. Hardcover. Octavo, 286...)
Athens 1988 University of Georgia. Hardcover. Octavo, 286pp., index, cloth. Fine, no DJ.
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( Edmund Ruffin (794-1865) is remembered as an innovative...)
Edmund Ruffin (794-1865) is remembered as an innovative American agriculturalist and pioneer in soil chemistry- and as an advocate of Southern secession. Here, published for the first time, are the two surviving volumes of Ruffin's manuscript memoirs, written in 1851 with additions in 1853 and 1855. Unlike Ruffin's diaries begun four years later, Incidents of My Life presents the public man, the Ruffin he wanted outsiders and posteriy to see. The volumes recount his career as a scientific farmer, his writing of An Essay on Calcareous Manures, his editing of the Farmers' Register, and the beginnings of his involvement in reform movements in the 1850s. His recollections were intended as a moral record for his heirs, focusing on himself as a good example. Also included are Ruffin's memoirs of his two daughters who died in 1855 and, as an appendix, his account of the death of his mentor, Thomas Cocke, which are useful sources for mid-nineteenth-century social history.
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( Edmund Ruffin was one of the most significant figures i...)
Edmund Ruffin was one of the most significant figures in the Old South. A gentleman planter, writer, and political commentator, he made his greatest contribution as an agricultural reformer, but it was as a militant defender of slavery and champion of the southern cause that he gained his greatest fame.In his voluminous diary, Ruffin has left an invaluable primary account of the crucial years from 1856 to 1865. This volume, the first of a projected two-volume edition, covers the period from Ruffin's retirement from his Virginia plantation to the aftermath of the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of 1861.Through the eyes of this outspoken secessionist, the reader views the chain of events which drove the nation steadily and inexorably toward disunion and civil war. An intelligent and astute commentator, Ruffin was personally acquainted with most of the prominent southern political leaders of the day, and his restless nature impelled him to be present at the most important events of the period.Ruffin attended several secession conventions, and as a member of the Palmetto Guard he was accorded the honor of firing the first shot on Fort Sumter. The diary contains vivid eyewitness accounts of the hanging of John Brown on December 2, 1859, and the activities and changing moods in Charleston during the hectic months of March and April of 1861. Ruffins' detailed description of the two-day bombardment of Sumter is unexcelled.The Diary of Edmund Ruffin is of supreme importance as a chronicle of political attitudes, moods, and motives in the South during the most critical period in its history. The journal also contains a wealth of information on travel conditions in the Old South, the reading habits and social customs of the planter aristocracy, and various aspects of the plantation-slave system.
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(Excerpt from The Farmers' Register, 1834, Vol. 1: A Month...)
Excerpt from The Farmers' Register, 1834, Vol. 1: A Monthly Publication Devoted to the Improvement of the Practice and Support of the Interests of Agriculture Emerson's Point, the farm of William Hambleton, Ma ryland, the improvement of, and the means used for the purpose 314 nclosures, law of 'in Virginia, its injustice and bad policy, and the enormous losses caused by it 185, 396. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Edmund Ruffin was born in Prince George County, Va. , the son of George and Jane (Lucas) Ruffin.
He was educated at home until his sixteenth year when he entered the College of William and Mary for a brief and unprofitable period ending in his suspension for neglect of classroom work.
Ruffin served as a private in the War of 1812, but saw no active fighting, and, after six months of drill and camp duty at Norfolk, returned home to assume charge of the Coggin's Point farm which the recent death of his father had left to him. Here he began the agricultural experiments which were to bring him fame and to restore his section to prosperity. Agriculture in Virginia at this time was at low ebb. The continual planting of a single crop on the same lands, and the use of bad methods in plowing and planting had depleted the soils, ruined the planters, and sent thousands of emigrants from the state. With little knowledge, either practical or theoretical, Ruffin set to work to discover the fundamental trouble and to find a remedy. After early failures, he observed that sorrel and pine always grew on poor lands and that calcareous earths were absent. Adopting a suggestion from Sir Humphrey Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1815), he began experimenting with marl in various quantities upon his fields.
Favorable results led to the conclusion that soils, once fertile but reduced by harmful cultivation, had become "acid" and had, thereby, lost their power to retain manures. This condition he now believed could be corrected by the application of calcareous earths (marl) and that a fertility equal to or greater than the original could then be acquired by the use of fertilizers, crop rotation, drainage, and good plowing. The experiences of the next few years were to prove the practical correctness of his conclusions.
In October 1818, Ruffin presented his theories and results before the Prince George Agricultural Society and three years later printed them in enlarged form in the American Farmer (Dec. 28, 1821, vol. III, 313-24). By 1832, they had grown into a volume of 242 pages, published under the title, An Essay on Calcareous Manures. This work ran through five editions and grew to nearly five hundred pages.
Still further to advance the cause of agriculture, Ruffin began, in June 1833, the publication of an agricultural journal, the Farmer's Register. It appeared monthly, first from "Shellbanks" and then from Petersburg. The editor, himself, wrote nearly half of the articles offered but he also reprinted the best articles from foreign sources and presented the ideas and experiences of the most enterprising local planters. For ten years this journal rendered invaluable service to the whole South and then failed because of the editor's activities for banking reform, especially the publication of another periodical, the Bank Reformer (Sept. 4, 1841 - Feb. 5, 1842). Ruffin early took a hand in the organization of agricultural societies.
He was one of the founders of the Prince George society and one of the leaders in the move to associate local societies for the purpose of opposing protective tariffs. In 1841 he was appointed a member of the first Virginia State Board of Agriculture and served as its first corresponding secretary.
In 1842 he became agricultural surveyor of South Carolina, publishing after a year's work the excellent Report of the Commencement and Progress of the Agricultural Survey of South Carolina (1843), which became a landmark in the agricultural history of the state. When the Virginia State Agricultural Society was organized in 1845 he was elected as its president but declined to serve under the impression that his work had not been sufficiently appreciated in his native state. He accepted this honor, however, in 1852 and two years later became commissioner for the society in an effort to put it on firm financial foundations and enlarge its usefulness. His work toward the establishment of experimental farms and agricultural education was particularly notable.
In 1843 Ruffin moved to a new estate, "Marlbourne, " in Hanover County, where he made his home until retirement in 1855. He wrote and spoke much on agricultural improvement in these years for newspapers, farm journals, and agricultural societies. His Address on the Opposite Results of Exhausting and Fertilizing Systems of Agriculture (1853), given before the South Carolina Institute, and his Premium Essay on Agricultural Education (1853), presented to the Southern Central Agricultural Association, were of high merit. In 1855 he gathered together a number of articles and issued them in book form under the title, Essays and Notes on Agriculture. His Notes on the Cane-brake Lands (of Alabama) were published in 1860, and his Agricultural, Geological and Descriptive Sketches of Lower North Carolina, and the Similar Adjacent Lands in 1861.
Ruffin was always interested in politics. He served for three years in the Senate of Virginia (1823 - 26) but resigned in disgust at the methods employed by politicians. He early became a Whig but drifted over into the Democratic ranks as the struggle over slavery and state rights developed. He was from the first an ardent defender of slavery and was one of the first secessionists in Virginia. He wrote much for the Richmond and Charleston newspapers, DeBow's Review, and the Southern Literary Messenger. His views on slavery were brought together in four pamphlets: Address to the Virginia State Agricultural Society on the Effects of Domestic Slavery on the Manners, Habits, and Welfare of the Agricultural Population of the Southern States, and the Slavery of Class to Class in the Northern States (1853), reprinted in part as an appendix to the second pamphlet, The Political Economy of Slavery (n. d. , probably 1858); African Colonization Unveiled (n. d. ), printed also in instalments under varying titles in De Bow's Review for April, July, September, October, November 1859 and November 1860; and Slavery and Free Labor Described and Compared (n. d. ), printed also in the Southern Planter, December 1859-January 1860.
In 1860 he published a book entitled Anticipations of the Future, designed to show the necessity of secession and the glories of an independent South. An advocate of direct trade with Europe, he attended three Southern commercial conventions and served as chairman of the Virginia delegation at the one held in Montgomery, Ala. , in 1858. He originated the League of United Southerners, and secured and presented one of John Brown's pikes to the governor of each Southern state. He was invited to sit in three seceding conventions and as a volunteer with the Palmetto Guard of Charleston was permitted to fire the first shot from Morris Island against Fort Sumter (Craven, post, pp. 217, 270). He was with his company as a "temporary" private at the first Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) and fired the shot that blocked the bridge over Cub Run. He spent the war period wandering about from one of his plantations to another as "Yankee" invasions necessitated but returned to Charleston from time to time to "aid" in her defense. With the collapse of the Confederacy, he ended his own life at "Redmoor" in Amelia County on June 18, 1865, and was buried in the family graveyard at "Marlbourne. "
Edmund Ruffin has been listed as a noteworthy agriculturist, publisher by Marquis Who's Who.
(Excerpt from Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Les...)
(Excerpt from Address to the Virginia State Agricultural S...)
(The centerpiece of this generously annotated book is the ...)
( In this second of a projected three-volume edition of T...)
( In this last of the three-volume printed edition of The...)
( History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native be...)
( Edmund Ruffin (794-1865) is remembered as an innovative...)
( Edmund Ruffin was one of the most significant figures i...)
(Excerpt from The Farmers' Register, 1834, Vol. 1: A Month...)
(Athens 1988 University of Georgia. Hardcover. Octavo, 286...)
In 1813 Ruffin married Susan Travis of Williamsburg. Three of his eleven children survived him.
