Edmund Ruffin

Edmund Ruffin was a Virginia planter, agricultural writer and militant advocate of Southern secession. He promoted soil improvement while also defending slavery and warning that the interests of slaveholding states were incompatible with continued union.

Ruffin was present at the bombardment of Fort Sumter and was celebrated by secessionists as having fired an early shot. After the Confederacy’s defeat, he died by suicide rather than live under restored United States authority.

Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest follows the crisis through Lincoln, William H. Seward, Jefferson Davis and P. G. T. Beauregard, while giving particular attention to secessionist Edmund Ruffin and diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.