Edmund Ruffin: Classic fire-eater and proslavery crusader. (Volumes I and II

This dissertation is an intensive examination of Ruffin's fire-eating and proslavery ideologies. Ruffin, along with other classic fire-eaters, viewed Southern honor and interests enmeshed in a dialectic whereby submission to Northern antislavery infringements was both dishonorable and injurious. He believed that secession alone could safeguard the slaveholders' prerogatives and avert their political thralldom to the North. But Southern honor transcended Southern interests. Although he professed that disunion would be peaceful and expressed confidence that the South could handily win any war that unexpectedly erupted, Ruffin was avowedly willing to risk a calamitous civil war and the utter devastation of his beloved South to vindicate Southern honor. Yet, Ruffin repeatedly endeavored to goad the South into adopting reformist measures to preserve slavery within the Union. While some of Ruffin's reformist programs (e.g., his 1850 proposal to divide California horizontally) were disguised recipes for disunion, others (e.g., his periodic exhortations to permit slave testimony) were compatible with the Union. Ruffin's belligerent and reformist streaks persisted through the Civil War.;A similar hybrid of aggressive militancy and defensive hesitancy marked Ruffin's proslavery ideology. Ruffin unabashedly proclaimed the moral and economic superiority of slavery. He devised schemes for the banishment or enslavement of free blacks. He flirted with reopening the African slave trade. And he even appeared to advocate the enslavement of whites. Nevertheless, beneath his exaltation of the blessings of bondage lurked undercurrents of negativism and pessimism. At times, Ruffin unwittingly revealed that he deemed bondage a curse to the slave. Moreover, the very framework from which Ruffin, as well as other proslavery theoreticians, rationalized slavery--Christianity, utilitarianism, and Malthusianism--set moral and temporal limits on the "blessings" of bondage. The upshot of Ruffin's proslavery effusions was not that slavery was intrinsically desirable as a "positive good" but that the institution was preferable or less evil than what he deemed to be the only alternatives: the perpetual sloth of primitive barbarism on the one hand and the chronic toil and insecurity of modern capitalism on the other.