eldest son on the James, from which the elder Ruffin himself had fled just
in time, among the graffiti soldiers left on walls was ‘‘You did fire the first
gun on Sumter, you traitor son of a bitch.’’
Edmund Ruffin’s two celebrated personae—premier agriculturalist and
architect of slaveholder independence and war—were by no means illogi-
cal or incongruent. Ruffin the white supremacist and holder (with family
members) of up to enslaved people consistently asserted not only his
class’s interest but an elaborate vision of a southern landscape so ma-
nipulated, so well maintained, as to be unthinkable without slavery. The
vision is most clearly presented, I think, in an address Ruffin delivered
to the South Carolina Institute in November . Titled ‘‘An Address on
the Opposite Results of Exhausting and Fertilizing Systems of Agriculture,’’
the paper might be overlooked as a dull précis of a reprise of hisEssay
on Calcareous Manures, then two decades old. Indeed Ruffin seldom tired
of redundancy on the subject of marl, but there is more here. Ever ob-
sessed with drainage as well as with calcium, Ruffin had long been an
advocate of what is called reclamation, in this case the drainage of wet-
lands large and small. A decade earlier, he had proposed (as had others
before him) clearance of the Great Dismal Swamp. Now, to a South Caro-
lina audience, he urged extensive and cooperative drainage of the entire
Low Country. ‘‘Lower South Carolina,’’ he said, ‘‘might possess the pecu-
liar facilities of Holland for extensive inland navigation. These connecting
canals, by diverting some of the superfluous supply of fresh waters of some
rivers, to others where it is deficient, might perhaps serve to extend greatly
the present area of tide covered land, capable of being flooded for rice cul-
ture.’’ The Ashley, Cooper, Edisto, and Santee would thus become an effi-
cient and profitable network. As an additional benefit—surprise—digging
the canals would doubtlessly uncover vast quantities of marl. Other (and
earlier) writings, combined with this address, suggest an ambition to re-
arrange landscapes that was hardly less monumental than the grandiose
schemes of water-mad early-twentieth-century California ranchers. Ruffin,
foe of federal power, seems to have anticipated New Deal public works
gigantism. Lacking dynamite, bulldozers, and big diesel-guzzling trucks,
Ruffin and other southern ‘‘improvers’’ of his generation required slaves
to perform the arduously disagreeable labor of landscape manipulation.
They, and mules and horses, then, would extend and improve corn-wheat,
rice, and cotton cultures from the Potomac to the Pamlico to the Cape Fear,
the Santee, and the Ashley—and yes, conceivably to the Savannah, Flint,