The Warping of Edmund Ruffin

David F. Allmendinger. Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xiv + 274 pp. William M. Mathew. Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. xi+ 286 pp. Had the Confederacy achieved independence, we would now acknowledge its hard-eyed, silver-haired icon, Edmund Ruffin, as a father of his country. It turns out, however, that Virginia's most influential nineteenth-century agricultural reformer and secessionist radical continues to enjoy his own revenge, as these two works help us understand. Virtually everyone interested in antebellum Southern culture and politics knows of Ruffin and has studied him. One reason for his visibility is his diary, rigorously kept from 1856 until minutes before his suicide almost ten years later.1 But Ruffin's increased accessibility to scholars and students, as both Mathew and Allmendinger make clear, comes as well from their relatively easy identification with him. Ruffin conducted systematic research, developed a significant personal library, and presented findings to his peers. He craved the extended solitude necessary for reading, reflection and composition. Indeed, he apparently preferred heroic encounters with his books to the tedium of farm supervision. These introspective qualities carried over into a fierce defense of his own work and its careful preservation, along with his correspondence and extensive memoirs. Like most academics, he had his own axes to grind. Historians and their students can look at Ruffin and see themselves

Art · Literature · Political science · Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · Classics · History · Law

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