RUFFIN

The Landscape of Fear

1860

THE CHOICE OF LINCOLN AS THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE SURPRISED Ruffin and disappointed him, because Lincoln seemed too moderate, too respectful of the Constitution’s protections of slavery, to spark the outrage necessary to drive the entire South from the Union, let alone galvanize Ruffin’s torpid home state of Virginia.

Ruffin had hoped the party would nominate Seward, a confirmed Black Republican; doing so, Ruffin believed, would have gone far in pushing the South toward secession. This new man, this “Lincoln of Illinois, inferior in ability and reputation to all—and whom no one had mentioned before,” as Ruffin put it, seemed less likely to have the same effect. Something needed to happen. Virginia continued to dismay him by its lack of action, its willingness, as he put it, “to swallow black republicanism, n—r, tariff, and all.”

Disgusted, he sought respite in a journey to White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, where he planned to meet his recently married daughter, Mildred, whom he sorely missed. She and her new husband were now settled in Frankfort, Kentucky, but Ruffin hoped to draw her away for a vacation at the springs.

AS HE TRAVELED THROUGH Virginia, Ruffin traversed a landscape charged with fear about slave uprisings and suffused with a generalized uneasiness about the future. John Brown’s raid had caused slaveholders to imagine a vast, organized conspiracy of abolitionists intent on instigating an insurrection. They found proof wherever they chose to look.

A large fire in Dallas said to have been started by enslaved Blacks sent rumors flying through one train that a large-scale uprising was underway in Texas. Slaves were said to have poisoned food and water supplies, poison being a particularly fearsome thing for planters, given the easy access of house servants to the kitchens of their masters’ homes. In February 1860, South Carolina congressman Laurence M. Keitt, thirty-six years old and an outspoken advocate of secession, learned by telegram that his brother, Dr. W. J. Keitt, a state senator in Marion County, Florida, had been murdered by his own slaves while lying ill in bed, “his throat cut from ear to ear,” according to one news report. Representative Keitt learned later that his brother’s district had been one of the targets marked on John Brown’s maps.

Most Southerners did not share Ruffin’s appraisal of Lincoln as being politically moderate. His nomination guaranteed that in the months before Election Day, the South’s anxiety would only increase. It left Representative Keitt virtually unhinged with fear. “If Lincoln is elected—what then?” Keitt wrote in a terror-filled letter to James Hammond. He envisioned poisoned wells and plantation houses set on fire. “With poison and fire how can we stand it? I confess this new feature alarms me more than even everything in the past. If Northern men get access to our negroes to advise poison and the torch we must prevent it at every hazard.”

Underlying these fears was the deeper dread that newly emancipated Blacks would take their place beside whites at all social levels, or even supplant them, perhaps even marry their daughters, the maximally feared “amalgamation.” That Lincoln himself never actually envisioned or encouraged racial equality, let alone intermarriage, became irrelevant. The South had reached a point where its suspicions alone confirmed these as his foremost goals and the primary objectives of the Republican Party. “If the South acquiesces in a Republican administration,” wrote South Carolina congressman William Boyce in a public statement in August 1860, “the question of negro equality is settled against us, and emancipation only a question of time.”

Adding to the overall disquiet was a severe drought that settled over the South, from Georgia to Texas, and lasted from July through the following autumn. In Texas it caused the tinderbox conditions that were likely the true culprit in the fires alleged to have been lit by slaves. The cotton harvest fell by over 30 percent, which had the effect of not only reducing planter income but also undercutting the system of credit in which cotton served as the security that allowed planters to expand their holdings. The corn crop was hit especially hard, raising fears of famine. Food prices soared.

As the South simmered and Texas prairies grew parched, Southern fears about a world coming to an end became amplified. The approach of Election Day and the seemingly inevitable election of Lincoln seemed to many to threaten apocalypse.

RUFFIN REACHED WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, Virginia, at seven A.M. on August 11 after spending a full night in a stagecoach. It had to be a welcome sight: a peaceful enclave of cottages and a large white hotel set in a valley among softly peaked hills along the west front of the Allegheny Mountains.

The resort was a popular destination for planters and politicians from throughout the South seeking to avoid the perils of the sickly season. One visitor counted guests from fourteen states and territories. A new and majestic hotel nicknamed “Old White” dominated the grounds, but the prime accommodations were the many brick or frame cottages and cabins arrayed in rows named for states. Here was Alabama Row, for example, and Carolina Row, where Cottage No. 16 belonged to Robert E. Lee, who, in addition to his army career, directed three plantations and managed some two hundred enslaved Blacks owned by his late father-in-law. A three-hundred-foot-long dining hall seated up to twelve hundred guests at a time; every day its kitchen staff slaughtered two cattle, twenty-two sheep, and three hundred chickens and turned out five hundred pies. The food was apparently as big a draw as the water. “When the dinner bell sounds here,” noted one visitor, John S. Skinner, founder of the American Farmer, “it is amusing to see how simultaneously all these cabins are emptied of their tenants, and how even all the dear ladies come flocking to be fed, like pigeons called down from the dove-cot.” The resort had a bath house for those who liked to bathe in the waters, and a domed structure that covered the spring itself for those who preferred to drink the water, which flowed at thirty gallons per minute at a constant temperature of sixty-two degrees. The water contained a stew of minerals, the largest single component being sulphate of lime. “The water has somewhat the flavor of a half-boiled, half-spoiled egg; is very clear, but not very cold,” wrote sixteen-year-old Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, Jr., a relative of the French emperor, during a stay at the springs. “Although the taste is very nauseous at first, the visitors become very fond of it in a short time.”

People came ostensibly for the therapeutic effects of the water, which was said to have curative powers over such afflictions as bowel irritation, chronic diarrhea, hemorrhoids—“piles,” in the parlance of the day—and dyspepsia, “the especial scourge of the sedentary and the thoughtful,” according to a promotional booklet. But the leading families of the South also converged here each summer to “mingle together under circumstances well calculated to promote social intercourse, and to call out the kindliest feelings of our nature.” The springs drew planters, bankers, and politicians intent on advancing their careers. Buchanan came, as did other presidents before him, and stayed in a cottage known as the Summer White House. The social gyre began at dawn when guests first began guzzling the waters—four or five tumblers at a time, according to one devotee—until the evening, when the resort hosted concerts and balls, both masquerade and fancy. The resort was renowned as well for fostering romance. It was here that Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, a twice-widowed father of five living daughters who would soon become the state’s governor, met his current wife, Lucy Holcombe, a sometime novelist twenty-eight years his junior who was renowned for her beauty. The romantically inclined could lose themselves in the “Courtship Maze,” a forested labyrinth with paths identified as “Lovers Walk,” “Lovers Leap,” “Lovers Rest,” “Acceptance,” “Way to Paradise”—and, of course, “Rejection.” Life at the springs was glamorous and exciting, too much so for one guest, who called it “a sink hole of extravagance.”

By the time Ruffin arrived, the resort was flush with over sixteen hundred visitors. He had always liked the springs but now judged it to be overcrowded and tedious. “I find much of the time here to hang heavy on my hands,” he wrote in his diary. Unmoved by the lighthearted atmosphere around him, Ruffin took every opportunity he could to argue the case for secession and to hand out proslavery pamphlets, but he found that amid the distractions of this festive environment—the gossip, the flirting, the promenades; the beautiful women and dandified men—his listeners paid scant attention. “I find myself alone as an avowed disunionist per se,” he wrote, “and I avow that opinion on every occasion.”

Here he received the sad news, by letter, that Mildred would not be able to join him after all. Crushed, he resolved to visit her instead and left the next morning, Friday, August 31. This was no casual journey, especially for the now sixty-six-year-old Ruffin: It would take six days and involve travel by stagecoach, train, and ferry, and be plagued by delays and hazards, including a railroad derailment and incessant attack by mosquitoes.

IN FRANKFORT, RUFFIN WAS disconcerted to learn just how strongly residents of Kentucky favored preservation of the Union. Even his son-in-law was a unionist, and this, as in all times of political stress, made dinnertime conversation problematic. Politely seeking to be a good guest, Ruffin avoided argument as much as possible. When prodded for his views by curious visitors who knew of his extremist reputation, he would try in a “jocular” manner to laugh the conversation into safer channels.

Meanwhile, he bombarded Southern newspapers with lengthy letters espousing secession and states’ rights.

While at his daughter’s home, he received two copies of his newly published Anticipations of the Future, in book form at last, but was dismayed to see that it was full of typographical errors and encased in a cheap binding. It emerged to resounding critical silence.

By this point, Ruffin had come to see grave threat in Lincoln’s ascendance. A Lincoln presidency, he told fellow fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey, would constitute “the beginning of a sure and speedy progress to the extermination of negro slavery and the consequent and utter ruin of the prosperity of the South.”

Election Day, seven days off, approached at the steady pace of a funeral cortege.