VIRGINIA

The Rubicon

1859

BY OCTOBER OF 1859, EDMUND RUFFIN RECOGNIZED THAT HIS EFFORTS to stoke disunion in his home state of Virginia had led to nothing, and not for want of trying. He had worked obsessively to promote secession. He traveled the countryside preaching disunion and took every opportunity to rage at Northern “tyranny,” arguing that the South was even more oppressed by the North than the early colonists had been by the British before the American Revolution. His zeal prompted one observer to call him “a fiery agent of disunion.” He looked the part: A man of middling height—five feet, eight inches, neither short nor tall—he wore his white hair down to his shoulders; his facial features were sharp and spoke of abstention and judgment, as if he were some biblical character sent to smite the evils of this world—meaning, mainly, Yankees. He loathed the North; like his friend James Hammond, he deemed slavery to be a morally correct and beneficial institution.

Now sixty-five, Ruffin was a deeply discouraged man, all but ignored by his fellow Virginians, who dismissed him as a hate-mongering fanatic. By mid-month he began musing about taking his own life. He had endured grotesque personal tragedy. He was tired, and bored, needful of affirmation that never came. His dream of Southern independence seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. Even books, once his great love—by the age of ten he had read all of Shakespeare’s plays—were losing their appeal. “Fond of reading as I am,” he wrote, “I cannot take pleasure in reading all day, and day after day.”

In an entry in his diary dated October 18 at his Beechwood plantation, he wrote, “I have lived long enough—and a little more of such unused and wearisome passage of time will make my life too long.”

The next day, news arrived of an event that had occurred two days earlier at the northern end of the state, something so unexpected, so shocking, especially to Southerners, that by the time Ruffin heard of it the South was calling for war.

It very likely saved his life.

UNLIKE HAMMOND, RUFFIN HAD been born into the planter aristocracy, the chivalry. He grew up on a plantation called Evergreen at Coggin’s Point, Virginia, one of the great planting and slaveholding enterprises in the state; upon his father’s death in 1810, he inherited the plantation and the enslaved laborers who worked its vast fields. A year later he married Susan Travis, a member of one of the state’s oldest families. She was eighteen, he seventeen.

He knew little about farming and learned what he did know mainly by reading agricultural texts. Over time he acquired three additional plantations and raised his total population of enslaved laborers to sixty-six. He gained stature as a capable planter, but this gave him only limited satisfaction. As so many planters seemed obliged to do, he decided to try his hand at politics and ran for a seat in the Virginia state senate. He won, only to quickly realize that he was ill-suited to the art of politicking. He had no skill at public speaking, as he himself acknowledged, and his personality was too rigid for the endless compromises that politics seemed to require. He resigned and returned to Coggin’s Point, where he devoted himself once again to farming.

Convinced that prevailing agricultural practices were wearing out Virginia land, he began experimenting with using “marl”—manure comprised of crushed, fossilized shells, a source of calcium carbonate—to reduce the acidity of soil. His efforts brought a striking increase in yields per acre. He was so pleased with the results that he wrote a book on the subject, An Essay on Calcareous Manures. It was no Ivanhoe, much adored by the planting class, but its publisher did issue 750 copies in the book’s first printing, a substantial number for such an obscure work. Ruffin was so taken with marl that when he acquired a new plantation of nearly a thousand acres on the Pamunkey River northeast of Richmond, he named it Marlbourne.

Marl became his obsession. He believed it to have near boundless power to revitalize sterile soils. No one else seemed to care. His book, although respectfully received—it drew a fifteen-page review in the highly regarded American Journal of Science and Arts—did not bring the attention Ruffin had hoped for, and Ruffin lived for attention.

He was gratified, therefore, when he discovered that his agricultural theories did gain at least one influential adherent, James Hammond, who, while governor of South Carolina, approached him with the idea of conducting a statewide survey of agricultural lands, mainly to locate undiscovered deposits of marl, but also to gauge the overall condition of the state’s soils and farms. Ruffin began the survey in January 1843 at the age of forty-nine and in the course of the year became close friends with Hammond. In South Carolina, Ruffin found himself appreciated in a way he had never felt in Virginia; he was captivated by the state, where he found his own secessionist impulses echoed by Hammond and a cadre of radical politicians. Charleston in particular appealed to him. He likened the city to “a gentleman born and bred, simply but perfectly well dressed.”

His survey took him from South Carolina’s Lowcountry to the Upcountry. The Lowcountry held the lush, flat, swampy lands that were ideal for growing rice and cotton, where planters readily accumulated wealth, slaves, and political power. Its summer climate was deemed too hostile for white people but fine for enslaved Blacks, whom racist anatomists determined would thrive in such harsh conditions. Here were the big plantations of myth, with magnolia-lined drives, house slaves in livery, and commodious homes with columns and piazzas, the “show plantations” owned by “swell heads,” as yeoman farmers called them. The Upcountry, above the so-called fall line, where rapids and waterfalls gave way to navigable rivers, was rougher territory, denigrated by the coastal aristocracy as being a primitive and uncultured domain. Most of the plantations Ruffin visited were small farms with one or two slaves, far from what Northern abolitionists tended to imagine.

This was rugged travel. Roads were bad, accommodations crude. Natural hazards abounded. Heavy rains turned creeks into freshets; snow fell. Snakes were ever present—cottonmouth and highland moccasins, copperheads, diamondback rattlers. (James Hammond’s own planting journals made repeated reference to the killing of rattlesnakes.) Night was filled with the roar of insects, a sound so prominent that when Southerners traveled north its absence was striking. Ruffin was beset nightly by biting flies called “no-see-ums” and clouds of mosquitoes, which swarmed the Lowcountry in particular. One Southern soldier pronounced the mosquitoes to be so large they were “almost able to shoulder a musket.”

Ruffin brought Hammond with him on some of his inspections and to meetings of local agricultural societies. In the evenings they sipped brandy and talked of their mutual devotion to Southern independence and secession. They shared confidences and commiserated about the cultural and personal isolation their livelihoods and interests fostered. Ruffin saw himself as an intellectual but deemed the South a realm that devalued rigorous thought and artistic achievement, and offered little opportunity for interaction with like-minded souls. He was lonely, intellectually and socially, a condition shared by other planters, including Hammond. Except when visiting cities like Charleston and Columbia, planters lived in a profoundly rural landscape separated from one another by miles of fields and forests, distances not speedily covered on horseback or by carriage; so primitive that wolves still roamed the forests and were known on occasion to settle under a planter’s porch.

Ruffin and Hammond shared their woes. “I have now lived so long by myself and in myself that I am utterly incapable of going into any crowd,” Hammond wrote to Ruffin. “I have no one in 50 miles of me more sensible and companionable than my driver Tom.”

Tom was one of his enslaved workers.

Hammond and Ruffin were, by their own mutual appraisal, lonely knights in an anti-intellectual kingdom. “I have no assistant, no sympathizer, no consoler,” Hammond wrote.

Ruffin understood. “If it be of any consolation to you to know of others suffering like yourself,” he told Hammond, “I can afford you some of it.”

Ruffin’s isolation grew more pronounced with the death of his wife, Susan, in 1846, after thirty-five years of marriage, during which she had borne eleven children, of whom three had died soon after birth. There were brief moments when the world seemed to awaken to his self-assessed greatness, as when in October 1851 the influential De Bow’s Review published an admiring biography of him written using details he himself had provided. Best of all, the Review published his portrait, “enough a likeness to make me known when seen afterwards by strangers.”

This was a momentary brightness. In South Carolina summer was always a worrisome time, the “sickly season,” when diseases like yellow fever and malaria settled over the landscape, borne by mosquitoes, though this connection was not yet recognized. Typhoid, an artifact of contaminated water, was present year-round. Local myth held that enslaved Blacks were resistant to these diseases, a fiction that allowed planters to justify assigning them to brutal work in the fields under blistering sun without a flicker of conscience, while the planters themselves fled inland to mountain redoubts that were cooler and drier.

In July 1855 Ruffin’s daughter Jane died of fever, possibly typhoid. She had lived with Ruffin at Marlbourne, along with three sisters; her abrupt absence from his daily life made his grief particularly acute. He prayed that he would not have to witness the deaths of any of his other children. He hoped to die first. “Oh God!” he wrote in his diary. “In thy mercy spare me this sorrow, by my being first called and removed by death.”

It was a prayer promptly denied. His youngest daughter, Ella, died a month later after a “slow fever.” A third daughter, Rebecca, died in November, in her thirties. Three daughters in a single year.

He lost another daughter as well, but not to disease. On July 30, 1859, his last unmarried daughter—his confidante and helpmate Mildred—announced that she had become engaged to a Kentucky schoolmaster. It took Ruffin utterly by surprise. “She is so dear to me that it would be a great source of grief for me to part with her,” he wrote in his diary. His sorrow was compounded when he learned that Mildred and her husband planned to move to Frankfort, Kentucky, five hundred miles away, which in this time, for Ruffin, was a distance as good as death.

His isolation deepened; so too did his sense of underappreciation and his dismay at his state’s unwillingness to embrace secession. He nursed a growing bitterness toward his fellow men, which stained the world around him. Once his ire was raised, he acknowledged, “my resentment is implacable.”

THE FIRST REPORTS CAME by telegraph. Newspaper offices posted each new message on their public bulletin boards and then pieced the story together in news articles for later publication.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown, a fierce abolitionist, led a company of twenty-one men in an assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia with the intent of arming the region’s enslaved Blacks and sparking a widespread uprising. (The town resides now in West Virginia, which joined the Union as a free state in June of 1863.) Local citizens and militia battled Brown to a standoff until a federal force arrived, led by Col. Robert E. Lee, for the moment an officer in the U.S. Army. Lee quickly crushed Brown’s insurgency, killing ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons. The effect throughout the South was galvanic. The raid and its leader were the embodiment of the chivalry’s darkest imaginings of slave uprisings. As one historian would later put it, “Not even the fieriest radical could ever have made the threat of an internal holocaust appear so real and imminent to Southerners as had the grim, dedicated Brown.”

Ruffin understood at once that this changed everything. He was elated. Although the news at first seemed hard to believe, he wrote in his diary, “it really seems now most probable that the outbreak was planned and instigated by Northern abolitionists, and with the expectation of thus starting a general slave insurrection. I earnestly hope that such may be the truth of the case. Such a practical exercise of abolition principles is needed to stir the sluggish blood of the South.”

In the North, reaction was laden with a surprising degree of nuance. Widespread condemnation of the raid was tempered by warm praise for Brown’s character and his moral stand. Even William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator made a distinction between the act and the underlying principle. Garrison described Brown as “conscientious, truthful, brave,” but called the raid “a misguided, wild and apparently insane” escapade. The New York Independent echoed this, declaring, “The insanity of the act does not impeach the rectitude of the motive.”

In the South, there was only rage and fear. Existing state militias saw a surge in new recruits; new companies formed as well and began actively drilling their volunteers. Stockpiles of arms expanded. Communities formed vigilance committees to identify and eject citizens who might be harboring abolitionist views. An Atlanta newspaper warned, “We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South who does not boldly declare that he or she believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing.”

Always ready to feel affronted and to express outrage, Charleston seemed particularly inflamed. Announcements in two city newspapers called for the interrogation of every male citizen to “learn whether he is for us or against us in the conflict now waged by the North against our property and our rights.” Outsiders and free Blacks in particular merited close interrogation. Scrutiny became aggressive. Despite a lack of evidence as to their true attitudes toward slavery, two South Carolina teachers with Northern roots found themselves expelled from the town in which they lived. One newspaper defended the action with the argument that since the teachers were from the North, they were “necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions.” The newspaper provided the emphasis.

In Charleston, Brown’s raid also produced a general awakening to the “demoralization” of enslaved Blacks. This did not mean the city suddenly began to worry about slave morale; rather, that Blacks had been given too much opportunity to consort among themselves in their own churches, schools, and communal residences and were showing far too much independence. The city, it seemed, had allowed its vigilance to wane. Some Blacks even had the nerve to subscribe to the antislavery New York Tribune. One domain where the city’s watchfulness had slipped was that of fashion, a particularly obvious marker of newfound pride. Blacks had begun dressing like wealthy white men and women, particularly on Sundays—“negro day”—when the city’s free Blacks supplanted whites in promenading along the Battery. One white visitor, in a letter to his wife, described how “the negro wenches crowd the streets in the height of fashion,” their male counterparts—“the n—r bucks”—doing the same. He found it risible. “All through the week they sweat and bark in the sun with a slouch hat, shirt sleeves rolled up and on Sundays they dress up in fine clothes, wear a silk hat and gloves.” He told his wife it was “enough to make a horse laugh.”

It was simply too much, and interlopers were deemed responsible. When the state legislature met in November 1859, it passed a number of measures aimed at reducing dangerous outside influences. One act required traveling salesmen to get a license. To apply, they needed two letters from South Carolinians attesting to their bona fides, had to post a three-thousand-dollar bond, and were required to swear that they would not interfere with or infringe any laws or regulations “made for the government of slaves and free persons of color.” A salesman caught without a license faced a two-thousand-dollar fine or as much as six months in jail. Even traveling circuses came in for scrutiny as likely sources of alien influence. The legislature increased the price of circus licenses by one hundred dollars.

The state’s then governor, William Gist, saw Brown’s raid as the logical culmination of the North’s growing antislavery agitation. The North, he said, had “crossed the Rubicon.” Alarm grew when evidence presented during Brown’s trial revealed maps of South Carolina with various targets identified. At stake was something existential: control of the entire Black race, as expressed by a Charleston grand jury in the wake of the raid. “It is proper,” the jury declared, “that the line of demarcation between the castes should be broad and distinct, more particularly at this time for reasons which need not be mentioned. It is full time that slaves and free persons of color should know and understand their position.”

UNTIL NOW, JAMES HAMMOND had been undecided about returning to Washington for the December 1859 start of the next Senate session. His bowels and gut continued to harry him, and the memory of his past trauma still haunted him. He feared, too, that appearing in the House could only hurt his nascent presidential ambitions. By this point he had begun to moderate his views on secession, arguing that at least for the time being, the South would do better within the Union than outside it, provided Congress left slavery alone. But after John Brown’s raid, Congress was in no mood for reasoned debate on the subject. Hammond once had described abolitionism as “dying out for want of fuel”; now Brown had provided fuel in abundance. Hammond felt that he had no choice but to return to Washington. He told a friend, “I fear it would appear like shrinking from duty not to go.”

He found Congress seething with sectional malice; it took the House seven weeks to at last elect a speaker. Every debate seemed to turn back to slavery. The mood in both chambers degraded to the point where representatives and senators began carrying guns, prompting Hammond to observe, “The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.”

He himself had a pistol, but unlike many of his peers, he kept it in his desk. He did what he could to staunch debate on slavery, fearing that such endless argument and deprecation could eventually drive Congress to concoct some form of legislation to regulate the institution. He repeatedly put forth motions to adjourn but nonetheless found himself becoming caught up anew in the drive toward secession.

HIS FRIEND EDMUND RUFFIN reveled in the growing national chaos, or more precisely, in the attention it brought him. While he still could not deliver a spirited speech, he proved adept at leveraging his new notoriety.

His rising fame annoyed Hammond. Both men had always been needful of public applause and praise, and now Ruffin was getting it in torrents. Hammond was jealous of Ruffin and his ability to win public acclaim by so deftly riding the crest of secessionist sentiment—jealous to the point where it caused a rift in their friendship. In a letter to novelist Simms, their mutual friend, Hammond condemned Ruffin’s “vanity and egotism.”

But to Ruffin, Hammond had become stale bread. It was time for his own dreams of secession to be realized at last.

When John Brown was sentenced to death on November 2, 1859, after a five-day trial, Ruffin saw a fresh opportunity to further raise his own profile as an apostle of disunion. He resolved to attend Brown’s execution, scheduled to take place in Charles Town—then in Virginia—and to make sure everyone knew it. Upon learning that only members of the military could attend, Ruffin persuaded the Virginia Military Institute to make him a cadet for just that one day. He was fully aware that his advanced age and his appearance could not help but draw notice, especially as the institute dressed him in a full uniform and placed him in its color guard. “When I made my appearance,” Ruffin wrote in his diary that day, “I could see what was very natural and excusable, that my position was very amusing, and perhaps ludicrous, to the young men, and it required all the constraint of their good manners to hide their merriment.” Ruffin loved it.

Ruffin found himself impressed with how Brown ascended the gallows steps seemingly without fear. Brown, he wrote, exhibited “physical or animal courage, or the most complete fearlessness of and insensibility to danger and death. In this quality he seems to me to have had few equals.”

Ruffin managed to take possession of a number of the “pikes”—long spear-like weapons—that Brown’s men had possessed, and urged the Virginia legislature to distribute them to all the governors of slave states as a reminder of the “unscrupulous and measureless enmity” of Northern abolitionists. When the legislature declined, Ruffin did it on his own but kept one pike for himself. He carried it on his travels after first labeling it “Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren.”

THE RAID DEEPENED RUFFIN’S conviction that Northern abolitionists posed a serious threat to Southern society. Ever inept at oratory, he sought to sound the alarm through writing. In February 1860, he read a novel called Wild Scenes of the South that envisioned a post-secession world. Dismissing it as “a very foolish book,” Ruffin decided he could write something along the same lines, only do it much better. He began work at once, framing his novel around the imagined letters of a correspondent for the London Times reporting from America just after William Henry Seward of New York won the 1864 presidential election. The novel, didactically entitled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time (the complete title went on for another twenty-three words), allowed Ruffin to give full expression to his hatred of abolitionists and the North.

Early in the novel the Times correspondent reports that he came to America convinced that slavery was wrong but changed his view, judging slaves to be “very far better provided for, and more happy and contented, than either the agricultural, manufacturing or mining laborers of England.” The Times man refers to enslaved people as “bodies without minds.”

“President Seward” sets out to destroy slavery, and soon the South finds itself in a state of “virtual bondage” to the North. At last the South rouses itself to action—Ruffin sets this in 1868—and in short order, six states secede and South Carolina occupies Fort Sumter. In response, the Union army marches into Virginia, prompting the rest of the South to secede as well. Now comes gore and retribution. A force of eight hundred Ohio abolitionists and twenty-seven hundred Blacks led by none other than John Brown’s son, Owen, bursts into Kentucky, slaughtering white people left and right, hoping to free the state’s slaves—but in Ruffin’s fantasy, the slaves don’t want to be freed. Kentucky militia companies counterattack. The Black soldiers of the North prove lazy, confused, and cowardly. “The fire of the Kentucky riflemen and infantry, as advancing nearer and nearer, was delivered rapidly and accurately upon the now disordered black mass.” The Kentucky men obliterate the abolitionist army and hang Owen Brown, along with twenty-seven of his white officers, all from the branches of a single oak tree, their bodies left dangling to be consumed by vultures. In a gleeful extra flourish, Ruffin has Blacks conduct the executions.

He prophesied economic mayhem. Without access to Southern markets, the North reels from financial distress; the South prospers thanks to trade with Europe. Violence breaks out in major Northern cities. In New York, mobs run riot (an eerie forecast of the “draft riots” that would occur three years hence). In two hours the entire city is engulfed in flames. The fire destroys every house in New York and Brooklyn, then technically a separate city, leaving ruins strewn with “charred and partly consumed skeletons.”

Ruffin wrote the novel at a daunting pace. He completed its 426 pages in two months and promptly published it in the Charleston Mercury in installments, with the idea of issuing it later in book form. He knew it wasn’t great literature. In his diary he confessed to fearing “deserved censure for literary demerit.” But he had a higher goal: “I cannot help sanguinely hoping that the book, as an argument and incentive to defense and resistance by the South, and for disunion, will have noted and good effect.”

Soon after Ruffin finished writing the book, the Republican Party, on May 18, 1860, at a clamorous convention in Chicago, nominated its candidate for the presidency.