RUFFIN

The Scent of Rebellion

NOVEMBER 10

AFTER THE ELECTION, EDMUND RUFFIN PROMPTLY SET OUT FOR South Carolina convinced that it alone had the resolve to act. (He had voted for John C. Breckinridge, Buchanan’s vice president and the candidate put forth by the Southern faction of the fractured Democratic Party.) He arrived in Columbia, the state’s capital, in time to be present on November 10, 1860, when, spurred by Lincoln’s victory, the legislature debated holding a special convention to decide whether South Carolina should secede from the Union.

Unlike in Virginia, Edmund Ruffin found himself feted as a hero. A contingent of students from South Carolina College begged him to come and speak. He declined, fearing failure, but was tickled all the same. Both houses of the state legislature offered him a seat on the main floor to better observe the proceedings. To draw further attention to himself, he had a seamstress affix a blue cockade ostentatiously to his hat. The cockade was a round rosette of ribbon two and a half inches in diameter that evoked the badges of the French Revolution and by now had become the emblem of those who favored secession.

The legislature approved the measure. It was only a preamble, a basic but essential bureaucratic step, but it moved the state closer to fulfilling Ruffin’s dream. He was thrilled. “Thus this great and important measure, which I have so long anxiously desired, is adopted,” Ruffin wrote, “and on this hereafter glorious day, the 10th of November, is inaugurated the revolution which will tear the slave-holding states from their connection with the Northern section and establish their separate independence.”

With the vote concluded and the secession convention scheduled to convene in mid-December, he set out for Charleston. “The time since I have been here has been the happiest of my life,” he wrote to his sons on November 11. “The public events are as gratifying to me as they are glorious and momentous, and there has been much to gratify my individual and selfish feelings.” He acknowledged that some of the praise for him was undoubtedly mere flattery, but it was pleasing all the same; it filled a hole in him that had existed since childhood. “What a contrast to my position in my native state, and among most of my countrymen!”

As Ruffin made his way toward Charleston, he was cheered and applauded. He was made the guest of honor at a rural pro-secession rally, where he was greeted by a band and cannon fire and was serenaded by the crowd. This was a Southern custom, a kind of call-and-response ritual where a musical serenade, either instrumental or choral, was rewarded with a speech. He obliged and for one shining moment found that his oratorical handicap had disappeared. Another crowd awaited him in Charleston on the street in front of his hotel with another serenade as women waved kerchiefs from the hotel balcony.

All of Charleston seemed caught up in the drive toward secession. Lincoln’s election and the prospect of the South’s coming under the authority of a Black Republican government had caused a spontaneous, universal upwelling of indignation, wrote Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, president of South Carolina College, in a public letter to the Richmond Enquirer. “You might as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them from secession. They drive politicians before them like sheep.”

Ruffin saw, to his amazement, that secession, to which he had devoted much of his adult life, might indeed come to pass. His optimism and that of his like-minded peers was reinforced when Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, weighed in with an editorial that many in the South chose to see as an acknowledgment of their right to exit the Union.

Greeley at this point was forty-nine years old, easily recognized in a crowd by his distinctive, and distinctly peculiar, beard—a ring of gray whiskers that radiated outward from underneath his chin like a bird’s nest, a likeness further enhanced by the egg-like appearance of his bald head. Greeley’s views mattered. The Tribune was the single most potent voice in American public opinion, with a weekly readership of one million people at a time when the nation’s population was 31.4 million.

Greeley wrote, “If the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace.”

ENERGIZED BY HIS STAY in South Carolina, Ruffin traveled next to Georgia to do what he could to foment disunion there as well. He watched as the state legislature debated whether to hold a secession convention just as South Carolina had done, but found Georgia’s leaders depressingly reluctant. He returned to Virginia, to Richmond, and saw that there, too, nothing had changed. Far from it. Critics condemned his actions in South Carolina and went so far as to threaten to run him out of town. Ever contrary, Ruffin stumped around the city with his blue cockade, his wild white hair flowing in the breeze.