The Diary of Edmund Ruffin. Vol. I, Toward Independence, October, 1856-April, 1861 (review)

350civil war history if you have any public documts that you think I would like to see pleose send them. I like to read anything against the Damd Bank." Aspiring soldier William H. Stephens urged, "Exercise half the zeal for me that I did distributing Circulars for you, and I can go to West Point." Aspiring poet Robert Mack wanted Polk to peddle to fellow congressmen a volume of his poems including an "irregular Ode" describing Napoleon 's battle of Marengo. Aspiring politician and lover Terry Cahal concluded a long political letter, "I am out as a beau about the 27th time & am actually courting two girls at this very time. . . . Marriage should be effected in a business like style upon reflection and not perpetrated in a passion." Aspiring student Williamson Haggard (term paper hucksters take note) asked Polk to compose him a "tolerable lengthy" speech against nullification, to be read at an "exhibition." In addition to these lighter bits there is a series of letters from a plantation overseer, illustrating well the travails of working for an absentee landlord. Totally absent are the crank letters we would expect in a modern statesman's papers, or even many letters of reasoned criticism, which is curious considering Polk's prominent role as Jackson's floor leader. The greatest absences of all are the dozens of Polk letters referred to in the incoming correspondence but which are lost. Without these, the scholar must still frequently read between other people's lines to find out about Polk's doings. But at least the lines are getting closer together. James E. Sefton California State University, Northridge The Diary of Edmund Ruffin. Vol. I, Toward Independence, October, 1856-April, 1861. Edited by William Kauffman Scarborough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Pp. xlv, 664. $20.00.) In light of his well-known fanaticism in favor of slavery and secession, one is somehow surprised to find Edmund Ruffin to have been as interesting and versatile a human being as this fascinating and admirably edited diary reveals him to have been. His extremism about the South's peculiar institution and for southern rights, even to the point of welcoming war, comes through vividly. But Ruffin's interest in agricultural innovation and reform, European politics and diplomacy, literature— both European and American, and his curiosity about all sorts of things recall the versatility of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. In his sixties and comfortably retired from his role as planter, Ruffin in the period covered by this volume of his diary interested himself less and less in the agricultural reforms that made him famous and more and more in the wisdom and necessity of an independent southern nation. Wandering restlessly from Richmond to Washington to Charleston and various other centers of southern life, he managed to be on the scene for a large number of the crucial events of the era, from the execution of John Brown to the Confederate bombardment of Fort BOOK REVIEWS351 Sumter. Yet the value of his diary probably derives less from his accounts of these famous episodes than from the picture of an intelligent, cultivated, and, in some ways, beguiling human being who rushed enthusiastically toward catastrophic civil war and who fervently defended slavery even as he scornfully declared that the growth of Mormonism was "one of the greatest wonders of this enlightened age." Admitting that in his youth he had been a "speculative abolitionist," Ruffin lived to deplore Jefferson and the aid and comfort which he had given to the foes of slavery. More at home spiritually, or perhaps politically is the word, in South Carolina than in Virginia, Ruffin made no secret of his extreme views and rejected the notion of any secret or conspirational approach to the goal of a separate southern nation. The hostile reception that his views and various political writings received in his native state of Virginia vexed him constantly; but, just as certain northern extremists found themselves increasingly applauded in the winter of 1860-61, Ruffin rejoiced to see Virginians, who had consistently opposed disunionism, move toward his position during the later stages of the secession crisis. Ruffin welcomed every development that served to split the...