CODA

Blood Among the Tulip Trees

THE SURGE AND RETREAT OF UNION FORCES ACROSS VIRGINIA FORCED Edmund Ruffin and his family to flee his Marlbourne and Beechwood plantations. When Union soldiers occupied them, they made it clear they bore a grievance against the family, especially Edmund, for his role as an instigator of secession and for having triggered the Civil War with that first shot at Fort Sumter. Beechwood in particular became the object of their animus. On August 17, a Sunday, Ruffin and his son Edmund, Jr., rode to the plantation after receiving word that it had recently been evacuated by its Yankee occupiers. They found the lawn strewn with feathers from ruptured featherbeds. To Ruffin the pattern of damage revealed something other than simple plunder: This was personal. His bookcases and desk were broken and twenty years of correspondence stolen. Many other items had disappeared as well, including all the bells the Ruffins had used to summon their slaves.

The occupiers saved their worst for the interior walls. Soldiers used these as a target for spitting wads of chewed tobacco and appeared to have taken particular effort to do so. They signed their names—Ruffin counted thirty-one—and scrawled obscenities. It was here that the soldiers’ enmity toward him, personally, bore clearest expression. One soldier cut to the heart of it: “You did fire the first gun on Sumter, you traitor son of a bitch.”

Worse was to follow. On January 5, 1863, the day he turned seventy, he learned that his daughter Mildred had died two months earlier in Frankfort, Kentucky, after an illness.

In a long self-pitying diary entry he mourned the lack of attention paid to him by his fellow Virginians throughout most of his life. “Yet, I have been elevated by fame to the character and position of a hero, and among the most lauded of the defenders of the Confederate States and their holy cause, merely for the accident of my having fired the first gun against Fort Sumter.” Without this, he wrote, “my patriotic labors and efforts would [have] been unknown—and my name almost forgotten in my own country, and by the generation which I have so zealously and effectively labored to serve.”

At first the momentum of the war favored the Confederacy, but then came crushing defeats that crippled Lee’s army. On May 23, 1864, Ruffin received word that his son Julian had been killed in action during a battle outside Richmond. Ruffin was startled by his own inability to grieve.

By now the old warrior had grown weary. For about a year, Ruffin had been living at a plantation in Amelia County, Virginia, that Edmund, Jr., had acquired as a safe haven away from likely zones of conflict closer to Richmond. Loneliness per se did not afflict him; but age, various infirmities, and seemingly boundless tedium had worn him down. “Under these circumstances,” he wrote, “my life has become a wearisome and galling burden to myself, and its termination, if to be speedy and painless, has already been more desired than dreaded.” He added: “I cannot die too soon.” The time had come, he decided, to end his own life.

He could not resist one final wail of anti-Union fury. In the last formal paragraph of his diary, he wrote, “I here declare my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connection with Yankees—and to the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living southerner, and bequeath them to every one yet to be born!”

He noted the time and date: Ten A.M., June 18, 1865.

And added: “The End.”

This was page 4,099; he had kept the diary for seven and a half years. He would have killed himself at this moment but had to pause. “Kept waiting by successive visitors to my son, until their departure at 12:15 P.M.” By twelve-thirty he was ready, even though his son’s new wife and two of her daughters were settled on a porch outside his window.

Ruffin sat in a chair, braced the butt of his loaded musket against a traveling trunk, settled a percussion “cap” in place (so named because these caps resembled tiny brass top hats), and placed the muzzle in his mouth. Ruffin used a forked stick to reach the trigger. The cap exploded, but the powder-filled cartridge in the breech did not.

Ruffin positioned a new cap, then pulled the trigger a second time. Now both cap and cartridge detonated. The bullet blew off the top of Ruffin’s head and, as the Richmond Whig reported, pasted “his brains and snowy hair against the ceiling of the room.”