Edmund Ruffin was born about a mile from where I live. His long white hair made him immediately recognizable to contemporaries, was born in 1794 and educated in Virginia, including a brief period at the College of William and Mary. For most of his life, Ruffin was a farmer and a renowned agricultural reformer. Experiments on his farm convinced him that fertilizers, crop rotation, drainage, and good plowing could revitalize the declining soil of his native state. From the 1820s onward, Ruffin published his findings, edited an agricultural journal, lectured, a nd organized agricultural societies. In the 1850s, he became president and commissioner of the Virginia State Agricultural Society.
Increasingly, however, Ruffin turned his attention in the 1850s to politics, especially the defense of slavery and secession. Although he had earlier expressed some doubts about slavery and opened the pages of his agricultural journal to arguments abo ut colonization, by the 1850s Ruffin had become a staunch proponent of slavery and of the racial inferiority of blacks. He joined the ranks of fire-eating southern radicals advocating a separate southern nation to protect slavery and the southern way of life. Secession became as great a reform cause as agricultural improvement. Both would rejuvenate the South.
Ruffin’s desire to push the secessionist movement towards a confrontation with the North brought him to Charleston during the Sumter crisis. He intended to take his stand with the Confederacy, and he hoped events would drive his native state, Virginia , out of the Union. His ardent southern nationalism made him a hero of southern radicals. He was invited to attend three secession conventions, and given the honor of firing one of the first batteries against Fort Sumter.
As the Confederacy’s fortunes ebbed during the war, however, Ruffin grew distraught. Plagued by ill health, family misfortunes, and the rapid collapse of Confederate forces in 1865, Ruffin proclaimed “unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule,” and on June 1 7, 1865, committed suicide. His act, sometimes considered the “last shot” of the Civil War, become identified with the Confederacy’s defeat and a symbol of the lost cause. His suicide was interpreted as an expression of the southern code of honor, the refusal to accept a life in defeat.
This fits with a hypothesis that has been building up in my mind the last few years. By no means am I a formal scholar in this subject. But as I've read about slavery and early American history, it's struck me how strong a concensus existed at the time of the American Revolution that slavery was a moral evil. Many of the Founders were slaveowners, but they themselves clearly expressed recognition that it was an institution they wanted go away. They just couldn't figure out a way to do it without an unacceptable level of societal upheaval and worse, so they optimistically hoped it would wither on its own.
But they did take steps to limit the damage, such as banning the importation of new slaves. I wish they had shown a bit more resolve in doing things like making the children of slaves free, but that's spilled milk.
Anyway, what interests me is how America went from having a concensus that slavery was evil and should be brought to an end at some point, to the bitter polarization of the Civil War. In the decades leading up to the war we find more and more fanatical apologetics (arguments) for slavery and how to justify it. These were in response to the increasingly fierce, uncompromising attacks on slavery and anyone connected with it by the abolitionists.
My basic thought is that the abolitionists, though I agree with them, executed a poor strategy of divisiveness that led to the war. Instead of demonizing their opponents, they could have maintained the concensus view and worked by degrees to cut off the supports for slavery as an institution until it did wither. By demonizing the opposition they caused a reaction that broke the concensus as slaveholders sought to defend and justify themselves. The quote above fits my thesis.
I'm a political hard-liner by nature in the here-and-now, so this carries some cautions for modern conservatives like myself. We have, and know we have, the moral high ground on subjects like abortion. But trumpeting that with a morally judgemental attitude that turns off abortion supporters will not win the pro-life war. I think there is a sincere concensus that abortion is evil and we should work to eliminate it. But if I follow my instinct to demand a sudden ban I wonder if the result might not be worse than the gradual work of persuasion and step-by-step restrictions on it until it becomes a historical relic.
Anyway... just thinking out loud this morning...