RUFFIN

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A Little Treason

JANUARY 9–12

EDMUND RUFFIN WAS STILL IN TALLAHASSEE MONITORING FLORIDAS secession convention when on January 9, with the convention still undecided, news arrived of the attempt by the Star of the West to reinforce Fort Sumter. This seemed to have a galvanizing effect on the delegates. Some who had staunchly opposed secession now endorsed it. The next morning, the convention approved an ordinance of secession by a vote of 62 to 7. Ruffin immediately telegraphed the good news to Governor Pickens in Charleston and to the editors of the Richmond Enquirer. He also complained in his diary of the extortionate cost of doing so—six dollars and thirty cents for a total of six words (over two hundred dollars today).

But fresh news more than balanced his displeasure. That day he learned of Mississippi’s secession and that Southern states were moving rapidly to occupy federal forts and arsenals. He credited Anderson’s transfer to Sumter and Buchanan’s willingness to let the major remain there. “If Fort Sumter had not been treacherously garrisoned,” Ruffin wrote, “no state would have seized a fort, or at least not in advance of actual secession.”

He decided to return to Charleston. It was hard work, this secession crusade. He left Tallahassee at four P.M., first taking a train to Monticello, Florida, then a stagecoach for the twenty-seven-mile ride to Quitman, Georgia, to catch a train on the Albany Rail Road to Savannah. Even over the mostly flat topography of northern Florida the ride was bone-jarring, especially for a man of sixty-seven. The roads were unpaved and pronged with old tree stumps and where they traversed swamps were corduroyed with logs. In describing a ride of similar length, one much younger contemporary wrote, “It almost killed me.” Ruffin reached Quitman after nightfall. His train was waiting but not scheduled to depart until two hours later. The coach dropped him off fifty yards away with his trunk. He made his way over rough ground in pitch darkness, “once falling and hurting my shin over a log.” The train was stone cold, with every seat already occupied by sleeping railroad employees (including the conductor) who had turned the car into a temporary bunkhouse. Ruffin went back outside and found a group of workers clustered around two piles of burning logs and stood by the fire for the next two hours. The train departed at 3:30 A.M.; it reached Savannah nine and a half hours later. There Ruffin received more heartening news: Alabama’s secession convention had just voted to secede by a margin of 61 to 39.

Ruffin was back in Charleston by one o’clock the next afternoon; the following day, Sunday, January 13, he joined South Carolina Secretary of War Jamison on a tour of the forts in Charleston Harbor that had been seized by state forces after Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter. Their steamer carried various engineers and civilian volunteers, as well as “100 negro slaves, sent by their owners gratuitously, to work on the fortifications,” Ruffin wrote. He added, “At Fort Moultrie, all was activity and gayety.”

Members of the chivalry—the militia volunteers—also helped. Enslaved Blacks hauled and piled sand to be used in building protective mounds and to fill sandbags; the white volunteers directed the action and moved sand in wheelbarrows to various parts of the fort. Ruffin stood for a time near where the slaves dumped their sand and the soldiers loaded it into the barrows. Always acutely aware of how he appeared in the eyes of the public, Ruffin asked one volunteer if he might take his place for a few minutes “so as to allow me to commit a little treason to the northern government.”

The soldier gave him his shovel, and Ruffin, white hair flying, filled the wheelbarrow.