Edmund Ruffin Was a Political Activist, Southern Agriculturist, Writer and My Ancestor

Edmund Ruffin

Patriot, Confederate, Radical, Agronomist...Relative

By Tori Lydick

June 2, 2010

Edmund Ruffin was a political activist, Southern Agriculturist, writer and my ancestor.

Ruffin was called by some the Father of American Agriculture because of his experiments and success in rejuvenating soils in early America. Edmund Ruffin's views were radical at the time, his actions even more so. His views of southern slavery and their need for the south's economy to grow were evident. He wrote about the slave system and how it differed from the North's use of "Free Labor" and the conditions of each laborer. Was paying a free-laborer $0.10 per day to work and be free in but to live in poverty and squalor better then the slaves condition in the South were they were feed, clothed and housed by their owner? Was the civil War a necessary conclusion to the debate of slavery or was it more about the States Ability to govern freely from the Federal oversight?

Edmund Ruffin was born on January 5, 1794, at the Ruffin family estate, Evergreen, at Coggin's Point (Bluff), on the James River in Prince George County, Virginia. His mother Jane Lucas Ruffin died while he was an infant his father George Ruffin remarried a few years later. A small and sickly boy, Edmund read much in his youth by age11 he had mastered the plays of William Shakespeare. His father died in 1810 shortly thereafter he attended William & Mary for a year where he was a middling student. His inability to study (mostly due from Alcohol and the charms of a young southern lady named Susan Travis) did not indicate and inability to learn--he read voraciously about agriculture favoring the English style. This knowledge would later become the foundation for his agricultural theories and writings.

He served briefly in the war of 1812 as a private in the Virginia militia but did not see any action. He returned to run the family farm at Coggins Point and married Miss Travis in 1813. They had 11 children before Susan Ruffin died in 1846.He gained control of the family farm at age 19 in 1813, along with 50 slaves. He was an orphan with no living kin, the farm had been his grandfathers passed on to his father who died only three years before his own fathers passing. "He came to adulthood deeply conscious of his responsibility to preserve and nurture the family's legacy in land and slaves."

Before his father's death he designated a family friend Thomas Cocke as his son's guardian they became close friends. Both shared the same interests in reading and agriculture. Cocke became an role model for Ruffin . In 1840, Cocke committed suicide for he had "Grown tired of bodily feebleness and general suffering. I cannot bear it and I will not bear it" .This event deeply affected Ruffin for the rest of his life and foreshadowed his own demise.

In 1823 Ruffin was elected a Virginia Senator he resigned after serving only three of his four year terms. During the Presidential Election of 1824, which was won by Andrew Jackson; Ruffin was outspoken in his displeasure of all of the candidates running because of their positions of expanding the Federal government's power over the States. This was his first episode of outspoken criticism of the government's style of rule.

Ruffin's property like others in Tidewater Virginia suffered from soil depletion over the years which was due to farming Tobacco. Tobacco farming depleted the soil of nutrients and left the soil all but barren. This caused many planters to migrate westward and leave their farms. Ruffin was unlike many of these planters and wanted to find a way to improve the soil and started experimenting with crop rotation and soil improvement. Ruffin experimented with the use of marl, an earthly deposit consisting of clay and calcium carbonate. Marl countered the depletion of lime and thus neutralized soils acidity. Ruffin published his results and became a prominent advocate for agricultural reform in the U.S. After publishing several articles in the magazine American Farmer, he went on to publish his first book in 1832 called "An Essay on Calcareous Mancures"

After his publishing success he focused less on his farming and more on publishing. In 1835 he moved to Petersburg, VA and started his own journal entitled Farmers Register. While publishing this journal his political views began surfacing as the country was going thru growing pains over the debates of "States Rights" and "Slavery".

In 1842 Ruffin purchased an estate called "Malbourne" located north of Richmond and returned to country life. He organized his family financially so that plantation proceeds supported his children equally and himself in the comfort necessary for reflection, writing and speaking. Ruffin's slave force at this time was close to 50 , they slave labor helped him restore the land in Malbourne to becoming fertile again. He had tried to sell his slaves when he first bought the estate but was unable to do so. Their discipline and long hours permitted the family to reclaim the land and turn it into a profitable plantation. This was turning point in Ruffin's defense of slavery as he saw it; "He could envision neither family security nor southern reform without it, it was not for the sake of mastering others, or restoring a feudal world that Ruffin took up the cause, secession and war, he did it for family and reform" Slavery was a necessity for the southern way of life.

James H. Hammond, a South Carolina politician, brought Ruffin to South Carolina. Hammond was a democrat best known during his lifetime as an outspoken defender of slavery and states' rights. It was Hammond who popularized the phrase that "Cotton is King" in an 1858 speech to the Senate. While in South Carolina, Ruffin developed two model plantations to put his research on marl and crop rotation to a test. The plantations were at Red Cliff and Silver Bluff. The crop rotation they practiced was based on Charles Townsend's 18th century theories and not George Washington Carvers concepts of forty years later. Ruffin's push for advanced agricultural techniques actually reduced the need for slaves!

After the death of his friend John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1850, Edmund Ruffin's stature in national politics came to the forefront. Ruffin's use of his journals to promote states rights and the need for slavery in south's economy to grow were championed. He had a huge appetite for reading the many newspapers of the day to gauge popular opinions.