THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

The Fire Eater

The Fire Eater

By Neil Kumar on Aug 26, 2020

Edmund Ruffin, the consummate Fire-Eater, was far greater than the sum of his parts; as Avery Craven, the finest of his biographers, expressed, "as the greatest agriculturist in a rural civilization; one of the first and most intense Southern nationalists; and the man who fired the first gun at Sumter and ended his own life in grief when the civilization that had produced him perished on the field of battle, his story becomes to a striking degree that of the rise and fall of the Old South." Gentleman, planter, radical, and warrior, the life and death of Edmund Ruffin is indeed that of the nation that he poured his life's labors into creating. As Craven continued, "The Old South that rose to completion in what are called antebellum days held no figure that better expressed her more pronounced temper and ways than did this Virginian."

Of high birth into a venerable family, the aristocratic Ruffin ended his honeymoon early to enlist as a private in the first volunteers' regiment called out from Virginia during the War of 1812. Though the young man saw no combat in his six months of service, the Virginian relished the military discipline which had been instilled within him, seeing, as most of our finest men once did, military service as equal parts duty and responsibility, the highest manifestation of the noblesse oblige which once suffused the American ruling class. He elaborated on this principle, writing that "young people of 'gentle birth,' or used to early comforts, but also of well-ordered minds, could undergo necessary hardships with more contentment and cheerfulness than other persons of lower origin, and less accustomed to the indulgences and the training that wealth and high position afforded."

Ruffin returned home to find the great farmlands of Tidewater Virginia ruined, its fields fallowed not only by rampaging British soldiers, but by generations of careless agriculture. Knowing next to nothing of the arts of farming, he looked to his neighbors for assistance, only to discover that it was an exercise in futility; his neighbors "adhered blindly to traditional, ineffective methods." Determined, he followed the instructions of John Taylor's Arator series to the letter, which only served to deepen his soil erosion. Equally as ignorant of chemistry, Ruffin was nevertheless intrigued by Sir Humphry Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, which speculated that carbonate of lime might neutralize soil acidity. Working from engravings in Davy's book, Ruffin reproduced the author's testing apparatus and used his new equipment to test the chemical composition of he and his neighbors' soil.

As Eric Walther explains, Ruffin's tests "showed that the fossil shells, or marl, so abundant in the region had sufficient alkalinity to correct the chemical imbalance in the fields." In early 1818, Ruffin excavated marl from pits on his estate; though Tidewater farmers had used marl before, Ruffin was the first to combine marling with John Taylor's methods of cultivation. His gambit worked wonders, producing a corn yield forty percent greater than his control sample. Walther thus remarks, "The self-trained scientist had proved skeptical neighbors wrong and discovered the key to rejuvenating the soil of the Tidewater South." In order to popularize his scientific agriculture, Ruffin launched a monthly periodical, the Farmer's Register, in 1833. This entry into publishing awakened something within the brilliant planter.

By the early 1820s, the Virginian believed that the Federal government, though it had not yet become the Leviathan that it was in short order to become, had usurped too much power; Ruffin feared , quite presciently, that his "States' Rights republican creed and principles will hereafter, as heretofore, be professed only by parties out of power and seeking its attainment." He possessed "very little respect for the general course and measures of any party" and therefore belonged to none; in 1823, Ruffin rejected all five of the likely candidates for the 1824 Presidential campaign, seeing Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, and William H. Crawford all to a man as having "disregarded constitutional checks on Federal power through their advocacy of tariffs, internal improvements, and Federal banks." Ruffin urged his fellow Virginians to support Nathaniel Macon, and, as a last resort, promoted the hated Federalist John Marshall; as Ruffin saw it, he would prefer an avowed, consistent Federalist to a Federalist who called himself a republican.