Chattahoochee, Coosa, and beyond, to that most interesting lower Missis-
sippi system.^9
tA slave-remade South Atlantic region was not to be, of course, nor was
an enduring slaveholders’ republic. Ruffin, seventy-one years old and ail-
ing, committed suicide in June . In his own later years and in recorded
memory, however, Ruffin’s reputation as a brilliant pioneer of agro-ecology
has become canonical. He was ‘‘father of soil science’’ in the South (if not in
all America) and savior of long-farmed, ‘‘exhausted’’ tidewater landscapes.
Thirty years after Ruffin’s death, the librarian of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture () wrote in the agency’s yearbook that theEssay on Cal-
careous Manureswas ‘‘the most thorough piece of work on a special agri-
cultural subject ever published in the English language.’’ (More important
than Davy’s work on chemistry?) In , Richmond’s venerableSouthern
Planteroffered a long article on contemporary leading southern agronomic
scientists and educators but reminded readers ‘‘that the South produced
the first man (Edmund Ruffin) who, in this country, endeavored to apply sci-
ence to the advancement of agriculture.’’ One of Ruffin’s grandsons, Julian,
still farming the marled fields of Marlbourne, supplied the photographic
portrait of Edmund that accompanied the article, to which was appended a
reprinting of the yearbook’s extravagant declaration of Ruffin’s
genius.
In those days, federal-state agricultural experiment stations connected
with such college-based schools of agriculture as Virginia Polytechnic In-
stitute’s seemed monuments to Ruffin and other antebellum improvers
who had long advocated formal agronomic education. Likewise Congress’s
creation of the Cooperative Extension Service in could be viewed as
overdue justification of southern improvers’ advocacy of expert outreach to
farmers. Sponsors of the enabling legislation were, after all, Senator Hoke
Smith of Georgia and Asbury Francis (A. Frank) Lever of South Carolina.
The Smith-Lever Act served every American farming county, but everyone
understood that the new Extension Service was built on an older, entirely
southern, organization that had been fighting the cotton boll weevil for
years. One can hardly imagine Edmund Ruffin inviting federal agents onto
private farms, but honorific memory was attached more to scientific agri-
culture than to the mechanics of delivery. Finally, in , the centennial
of Ruffin’s own magnum opus, the first scholarly biography of the great
man appeared. This was the work of Professor Avery Odell Craven of the
University of Chicago:Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession.By