Edmund Ruffin

Edmund Ruffin was born in Prince George County, Virginia, on January 5, 1794, and made his reputation not as a politician but as an agricultural reformer. His Essay on Calcareous Manures, first published in 1832, showed Tidewater planters how marling could bring exhausted tobacco land back into production. It was serious, useful work, and it made him a respected man across the South long before he became a notorious one.

Politics consumed him late and completely. By the 1850s Ruffin had become one of the loudest of the fire-eaters, the small band of agitators who argued that the South's only future lay outside the Union. When South Carolina called its secession convention in December 1860, the sixty-six-year-old Virginian traveled to Charleston to watch it — a spectator at the disunion he had spent a decade demanding. He stayed on through the winter standoff at Fort Sumter.

On April 12, 1861, Ruffin was at Cummings Point on Morris Island, attached to the Palmetto Guard, and he pulled a lanyard on the Iron Battery. He is popularly remembered as the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War. He was not. The signal shell came from Fort Johnson, and scholarly consensus holds that the identity of the man who fired the war's first round is unknown; Ruffin is believed to have fired the first shot from the Morris Island batteries after the bombardment was already underway. It is a distinction he did nothing to discourage, and one that has clung to him for a century and a half.

He returned to Charleston once more, in late 1863, and spent the balance of the war on his Virginia land. What he saw coming there was not defeat so much as annihilation. Early in 1865 he set down his view of “subjugation to Yankee power [as] the last & worst of all evils.”

On June 17, 1865 — a little over two months after Appomattox — Ruffin carried a rifle and a forked stick up to his study at Redmoor, in Amelia County. He was interrupted by callers at the front door. When they had gone, he sat down, made a final entry in the diary he had kept for decades, put the muzzle in his mouth, and pushed the trigger with the stick. The cap snapped without firing. He reloaded, and the second attempt killed him. He was seventy-one.

The last thing he wrote has outlived everything else he ever published:

And now, with my latest writing & utterance, & with what will be near to my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule — to all political, social, & business connection with the Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.

The photograph is a Quinby & Co. portrait, made in Charleston. Ruffin sat for it wearing his hair long to his shoulders, a deliberately archaic look even in 1861, and one that made him instantly recognizable in a crowd.