November, 1860. |
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| Edmund Ruffin. |
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[48]
From the same balcony Edmund Ruffin, of Virginia, a white-haired old man, made a speech to the excited people.
He was well known as a political and agricultural writer, and a warm personal friend.
and admirer of John C. Calhoun and his principles.
He had made it an important part of the business of his life to applaud the system of Slavery, and to create in the Slavelabor States a hatred of the people of the Free-labor States.
He soon afterward acquired the unenviable distinction of having raised the first spadefull of earth in the construction of military works for the assault on Fort Sumter, and also of having fired the first shot at that fortification.1 He had now hastened from his home in Virginia to Columbia, to urge the importance of immediate secession.
“I have studied the question now before the country,” he said, “for years.
It has been the one great idea of my life.
The defense of the South, I verily believe, is only to be secured through the lead of South Carolina.
Old as I am, I have come here to join her in that lead.
I wish Virginia was as ready as South Carolina, but unfortunately, she is not. But the first drop of blood spilled on the soil of South Carolina will ring Virginia and every other Southern State to her side.”
It had been ag reed that revolutionary movements should commence immediately after the fact should be made known that Mr. Lincoln was elected.
Accordingly, on the evening of the 7th,
a dispatch went up to Columbia from Charleston, saying that many of the National
officers had resigned.
That morning, the United States District Court had assembled in Charleston, over which one of the leaders of rebellion, Judge A. G. Magrath, presided.
The Grand Jury, according to instructions, declined to make any presentments.
They said that the action of the ballot-box on the previous day had destroyed all hopes of a permanent confederacy of the “Sovereign States,” and that the public mind was constrained to “rise above the consideration of details in the administration of law and justice, up to the vast and solemn issues that have been forced upon us — issues which involve the existence of the Government of which this Court is the organ.”
They therefore declined to act. This solemn judicial farce was perfected by the formal resignation of Judge Magrath.
With ludicrous gravity, he said to the jurors:--“For the last time I have, as Judge of the United ”
1 Ruffin was in Richmond at the close of the following summer, and visited the National prisoners who ware captured at the battle of Bull's Run in July. Hie told them that he was then a resident of Charleston, in South Carolina, and boasted that he was the person who fired the first shot at Sumter. Mr. Ely, member of Congress, who was among the prisoners, speaks of him in his Journal, kept while in confinement in Richmond, as “a patriarchal citizen, whose long locks extended over his shoulders, whitened by the snows of more than seventy winters.” Ruffin did not appear prominently in the war that ensued. He survived the conflict, in which he lost all of his property. On Saturday, the 17th of June, 1865, he committed suicide by blowing off the top of his head with a gun, at the residence of his son, near Danville, in Virginia. He left a note, in which he said--“I cannot survive the liberties of my country.” The wretched man was then almost eighty years of age.
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