A Chance Encounter with Edmund Ruffin
Leafing Through “Paper Lots”
In the antiques business, we often see “Paper Lots,” which are large groups of papers that someone, somewhere has collected and that eventually come to be sold together in a big box of mixed and sometimes musty documents. There can be quite a wide variety of items. Usually, valuable documents have already been removed by the lots’ previous owners. Every once in a great while, however, paper lots will contain a happy surprise.
Many paper lots have old newspapers in them. These can be interesting to read but are usually musty and ready to fall apart. Also, business and personal letters kept by a family turn up in these paper lots, but they often don’t refer to any arena of interest beyond the family itself. Old photographs or advertisements may be thrown in. Sometimes, the greatest interest in a paper lot is simply in the leafing through, to see what was of interest to someone, what was deemed important, what felt like it should be retained - so much so that the “family historians” decided to store some item away in a box, save it, and keep it together with other items for many, many years.
We recently bought a paper lot that had promise. Together with the normal letters to the Congressmen from the late 1940’s, old newspapers, household accounts, and some over-exposed vacation photos, there was a series of letters dated from the mid-1820s. These were carefully written by a woman in Virginia to certain friends and acquaintances in London, to introduce her former minister, now located at a University in Kentucky, to London society. Apparently, he was moving, visiting, or taking a sabbatical there, and took with him this former parishioner’s letters of introduction to help admit him into polite society. Quite an unusual and interesting find.
Underneath this odd assortment of documents, however, was another letter that, undoubtedly, had escaped attention for a long, long time.
The “Father of Soil Chemistry” in America
There
was one other letter in this paper lot, dated December 20, 1821.
It was in a folio, one large paper folded into four sections with an
address and a faded postmark on the outside.
The three pages of text were densely hand-written, to John Skinner of
Baltimore, from a man named Edmund Ruffin.
The name was familiar to me, so I performed a little research into what
this was all about.
The subject of the letter was problems with the propensities of the soil in Virginia, and Ruffin’s efforts to publish his views and findings about modern (for 1821!) farming. It turns out that Ruffin was a farmer and “practical scientist”, having confronted the awful farming conditions of early-19th Century Virginia himself. Migration west to Kentucky and Tennessee was becoming a big problem then, not to find freedom on the frontier (as we now often assume) but because the arable land in the “old South” was being worn out.
Ruffin
was referred to as the “Father of Soil Chemistry” in America.
As a farmer himself, he took great pains to work on improving his soil
and studying agricultural practices such as crop rotation and the use of
manures. His experiments helped
establish farming practices that have been in use throughout the history of the
South. He helped preserve
Virginia’s position of power and affluence in Dixie, by making agriculture
more productive and profitable, and by stemming the tide of westward migration.
His theories were published (early on by John Skinner of Baltimore, in
his American Farmer publication), and widely distributed all across the
South, and elsewhere. U.S.
President John Tyler once noted that a Ruffin essay would “be worth more to
the country than all the state papers that have been the most celebrated in our
time.” [see Edmund Ruffin,
Southerner, by Prof. Avery Craven (Univ. of Chicago 1932), p. 56].
This
letter, in the paper lot, was one of Ruffin’s correspondences with Skinner on
these topics and was evidence of early efforts to distribute and publicize his
work. It was an interesting find.
Still, I wasn’t immediately clear on why I had heard of Edmund Ruffin
in the first place. After all, I
had never paid much attention to “soil chemistry.”
The
“Fire-Eater”
For
his efforts, Ruffin was given a unique privilege.
With his wild look of a devoted partisan, his long-flowing white hair,
and dressed up in his old military uniform, Ruffin came in 1861 to one of the
batteries encircling Fort Sumter, in South Carolina. There, for his efforts, he was given the great honor of
setting off the first shot on Fort Sumter, thus commencing America’s Civil
War. He is said to have given
additional service in the artillery on behalf of the Southern armies during the
war, although at his age his main purpose was undoubtedly to rally the much
younger soldiers around him. In
1865, in a wrenching despondency over Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the troops
to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Edmund Ruffin committed suicide.
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So, this is a small example of what a “paper lot” can generate. On that rare but special occasion, it can provide a window into a remarkable journey through American history. Come to think of it, this is a metaphor for what the Antiques business is really all about!
©2003-2005 Marylou DiPietro
Chesham Depot Antiques