THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 6, 1997 TAG: 9701060044
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: COLUMN
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 72 lines
Ever since I was first exposed at the age of 10 to the gospel of the Southern Confederacy as promulgated by Miss Sue Tatem, my ardently partisan history teacher at George Washington School in Berkley, I have never doubted that Virginia's quintessential Yankee hater Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot on Fort Sumter and touched off the four-year holocaust of the Civil War.
Well, it seems I have been suffering under a delusion. According to ``The Civil War Day by Day: Almanac 1861-1865'' by E. B. and Barbara Long with a foreword by Bruce Catton, here's what actually happened.
Under the entry for April 12, 1861, headed ``Fort Sumter Fired Upon and Replies. War Begins!,'' the Longs reported: ``At 4:30 a.m. the signal shot was fired from the post of Capt. George S. James at Fort Johnson, with other batteries opening according to previous orders. Capt. James gave the order and, probably, one Henry S. Farley actually fired the signal shot that arched in the night sky over Charleston Harbor.''
Turning to Ruffin, the Longs continued: ``Edmund Ruffin, Virginia agriculturalist and fiery Confederate, did not, apparently, fire the first real shot, despite the legend. He did fire the first shell from columbiad No. 1 of the iron battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island. The rotation of fire, which was followed, brought this battery into action late. But it matters little; the signal shot did it and the war guns spoke.''
Even though this entry in the Longs' fascinating 1,135-page chronicle deprives Ruffin of his traditional glory, this is no reason to relegate him to the dust heap of history.
Born 203 years ago in Prince George County, Ruffin was a member of the Virginia planter aristocracy. In 1813, after attending William and Mary College briefly, he inherited his father's plantation at Coggin's Point on the James River.
One of the first Southerners to experiment with proper fertilization and crop rotation, Ruffin's Coggin's Point farm soon became a model agricultural establishment copied by every progressive Virginia planter. His experiments in land animal husbandry also were promulgated by his writings, and for a decade he edited and published the ``Farmer's Register'' that popularized his theories throughout the South.
Ruffin was not content to merely excel as a progressive planter. An early advocate for secession from the Union, he also authored ``The Practical Economy of Slavery,'' in which he shamelessly defended human bondage on a moral and economic basis. When abolitionist John Brown was executed in 1859, Ruffin turned up wearing a borrowed Virginia Military Institute coat and musket to witness the hanging. Later, he secured and presented one of Brown's pikes to the governors of each of the Southern states.
Still later, the day before Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration, the 67-year-old firebrand left Virginia for Charleston, S.C., to ``avoid being under (Lincoln's) government even for an hour.'' As a reward, he was presented with the pen that signed South Carolina's ordinance of secession.
But Ruffin's dream of a Southern Utopia was never realized. Four years later, with the Confederacy in shambles, he was living in Amelia County. Overwhelmed by the South's defeat, the embittered aristocrat committed suicide on June 18, 1865.
Before ending his life, however, Ruffin fired a parting salvo at his lifelong enemies. The last entry in his diary reads: ``And now with my latest writing and utterance, and what will be my last breath, I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule - to all political, social and business connections with the Yankees, and the perfidious malignant and vile Yankee race.''
These bitter words have caused many historians to write Ruffin off as a fanatic. But his real worth was recognized in a Virginian-Pilot editorial on April 12, 1961, that ended with this paragraph: ``What is important to remember is that Edmund Ruffin fired the movement for scientific agriculture in the South. If the invoking of his name and his work during the Civil War Centennial refreshes the South with the lessons he taught, this will be much more profitable than fighting the battles over on tourist-trampled battlefields.''