DCWEDMUND RUFFIN (1794–1865) WAS THE VERY epitome of the Southern “fire-eater,” as radical defenders of slavery and the society on which it was based were known. Convinced that their plantation system was a positive good for both slaves and the South, fire-eaters opposed any compromise with the North that would limit the extension of slavery and might lead to its extinction. After 1850, as political efforts to resolve differences between slave states and free states broke down, each side in the sectional crisis stepped up rhetorical attacks on the other. In that violently charged political atmosphere, disunion became not just a very real possibility but one welcomed by fire-eaters.
A Virginia plantation owner, Ruffin had deep roots in the slave South. By 1860, his family held some two hundred people in slavery. He first came to public notice as an agricultural reformer, proposing ways to improve farming practices and replenish exhausted soil. Moving on from agricultural reform, he turned to politics and offered a defense of the South as a civilization superior to the North by touting the presumed benefits of the plantation system for both whites and blacks. Underlying his argument was the racist assumption that African Americans were naturally suited for slavery and unfit for freedom. Furthermore, Ruffin and other fire-eaters claimed that the emancipation of slaves—which they suspected was Abraham Lincoln’s hidden agenda—would reduce Southern whites to menial status and make Northerners their masters. The presidential election of 1860, Ruffin wrote, would decide “whether these southern states are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved.”
After Lincoln’s election, Ruffin moved to Charleston, South Carolina, thrilled by the leadership role that the Palmetto State was taking in the secession movement and disgusted by the lukewarm response in Virginia. Ruffin was in Charleston during the “secession winter” of 1860–61 as battle loomed. A war for Southern independence was the consummation of his dreams. Fittingly, the sixty-six-year-old fire-eater attached himself to the Palmetto Guards and in the early hours of April 12, 1861, pulled the lanyard on a cannon that fired what may have been the first shot aimed at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor
Too old and infirm for extended military duty and temperamentally unsuited for office-holding, Ruffin spent the Civil War at a farm west of Richmond, following the ebb and flow of battle, which engulfed his family’s property east of Richmond. With the Confederacy defeated and his hopes for an independent South dashed, Ruffin faced a bleak future. On June 17, 1865, he wrapped himself in a Confederate flag and committed suicide with a musket. Credited with firing the first shot of the Civil War, Ruffin can also be said to have fired its last. But in a suicide note declaring his “unmitigated hatred of Yankee rule,” he foreshadowed the bitter conflicts of Reconstruction and its aftermath, when an unrepentant South rejoined the Union. DCW
OPENING FIRE Edmund Ruffin, pictured around 1861 (FIRST IMAGE), urged an attack on Fort Sumter and helped launch it. The attack unfolded within view of Charlestonians, portrayed on rooftops in an illustration from Harper’s Weekly (SECOND IMAGE) showing dark smoke billowing from Fort Sumter.
