Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South.  By William M. Mathew.  (Athens:  The University of Georgia Press, 1988.  Pp. ix-271.)

William M. Mathew exhausts a plethora of primary sources pertaining to antebellum agriculture including the Farmers Register, the Southern Planter, and Edmund Ruffin’s personal papers.  This information is used to examine the relationship between slavery and agricultural reform in the antebellum south.  Mathew’s study focuses on the reform ideas proposed by fire-eater Edmund Ruffin.  According to Mathew, “[Ruffin’s] main long-term purpose was to secure the future of the slave South through economic adaptation.  When he saw that his efforts were failing he gradually moved his emphasis from economics to politics” (p. x).  Thus, Ruffin advocated secession once it became apparent that he could not protect slavery through agricultural reform.

Mathew begins outlining Ruffin’s life and his endeavors pertaining to agricultural reform.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, “he had established himself as the South’s leading agricultural reformer” (p. 20).  In addition, Ruffin earned the title the “father of soil chemistry” and wrote an instructional book for his fellow planters entitled An Essay on Calcareous Manure. 

Next, Mathew examines Ruffin’s defense of slavery.  According to Mathew, Ruffin could not formulate a convincing economic case that defended slavery.  “His arguments for slavery were not those of an economist but of a conservative patriarch and racist” (p. 56).  As a result, Ruffin defaulted to secessionism.  According to Mathew, “Ruffin’s central position on slavery was that slaves could not possibly be freed.  Confined, they propped up white society; liberated, they would obliterate it . . . The attachment was to slavery as an instrument of survival rather than progress” (p. 66). 

Subsequent to introducing Ruffin, Mathew discusses the possibilities of land amelioration in the antebellum south.  He concentrates on the use of marl – a calcareous earth – used to alleviate soil acidity (p. 77).  Mathew writes about Ruffin’s reforms in practice beginning with the effects of marling and liming. 

Ruffin introduced several new agricultural reforms.  The planter/fire-eater became a staunch advocate of marling.  According to Mathew, marling improved soil thereby yielding higher profits.  This in turn enhanced property value.  Unfortunately, most planters underutilized marling in the antebellum south.  “Marling never became a commonplace activity in the Old South prior to the Civil War” (p. 117).  Ruffin also prescribed lime as a treatment for elevated soil acidity.  Liming, however, proved problematic for numerous reasons forcing planters to abandon this technique.  Finally, Ruffin stressed forage-and-livestock diversification.  These techniques ultimately failed.  Mathew attempts to connect this failure to slavery.

Most antebellum southern planters ignored Ruffin’s agricultural advice.  According to Mathew, this fact is related to the broader slave economy and southern society With regards to society, Mathew blames poor transport and inadequate entrepreneurship.  Planters did not have access to adequate marl and lime reserves, nor did they contain an efficient means to move them.  In addition, labor intensive marling required both, “intelligence and perseverance from the planter” (p. 175).  Most southern planters were unwilling to seize the initiative and invest in marling.

Mathew draws several conclusions from his research.  First, Edmund Ruffin’s agricultural reforms failed.  While they proved both scientifically and theoretically sound, the reforms never became widely adopted.  Second, in an effort to protect slavery via agricultural reform, Ruffin became, “a victim of the institution he sought so desperately to protect” (p. 199).  Finally, Mathew states that, “In summary, it seems that [slavery] hindered agricultural improvement in three principal ways:  through entrepreneurship, through transport, and through the impulse and spirit of reform” (p. 204).  The author goes on to discuss each in detail.  Succinctly stated, the failure to adopt Ruffin’s scientific and complex agricultural reforms highlights the inefficiency of the slave labor system in the Old South. 

Although this book provides insight into the sophisticated methods employed in antebellum farming, it contains many problems.  His evidence does not fully support the supposition that Ruffin defaulted to secession once his agricultural reforms could not protect slavery.  The author tries too hard to draw a connection between these two points.    In addition, his description of antebellum farming becomes onerous.  One needs a background in chemistry or agriculture in order to fully understand Mathew’s section on alleviating soil acidity.  This book is recommended to those interested in Edmund Ruffin’s ideas pertaining to farming.

Texas Christian University                                                                  Justin S. Solonick

Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South:  The Failure of Agricultural Reform.  By William M. Mathew.  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1988).

William Mathew examines the life and contributions of Edmund Ruffin, the secessionist who committed suicide in 1865.  He details Ruffin’s work as an agricultural reformist before he became involved in the movement to secede from the Union and how slavery, that peculiar institution, could not adapt to the necessary economic and agricultural reforms Ruffin advocated. 

Mathew divides his scholarly work into five parts, each detailing different aspects in the Ruffin’s life as an economic/agricultural reformer.  In the preface, the author states that the purpose involves examining the role of slavery and agricultural reform in the Old South.  In the first section, he examines the issue of a slave society in the old South and whether it could survive or adapt to change.  The author also provides a general overview of Edmund Ruffin’s life, with emphasis on his role as a farmer.  He also expresses that Ruffin’s arguments did not come from an economist, but from “a conservative patriarch and racist.  He was pursuing economic revival to save an institution” (p.56).

The next two sections focus on the agricultural reforms that Edmund Ruffin tried to start in the heavily acidic soil of the Southeast.  The author gives a basic lesson on chemistry so the reader could understand about the problems of a low pH level in the soil and how Ruffin offered a way to correct it by introducing calcium carbonate and marl.  He details how to mine it and distribute on the fallow lands.

In section four, the author examines the problem of slavery and how it proved incompatible to Ruffin’s effort to implement agricultural reform.  He relates how the labor-intensive mining of Marl could still be done during slow parts of the growing season, but due to the effects of slavery on the Southern mindset led to indolence and lassitude which contributed to the lack of expanding the infrastructure for an internal transportation system in the South.  Thus, the majority of the Southern growers refused to follow his reforms while Northern growers embraced it.

In the conclusion, Mathew draws all the various factors of his work together.  In this final section, he states, “to say that slavery had certain powerful, retarding influences on the reform movement while at the same time exercising, looser, more indirect effects by its contribution to the persisting of rurality of the South.” (p. 211).  The author provides statement as a direct link of slavery to the decrease in adaptability of southern society.  This does not adequately explain why Ruffin’s reforms did not become implemented on a broader scale than it did.  Mathew does not give strong enough emphasis on how Ruffin’s caustic personality and temperament would have negatively influenced potential converts to his agricultural reforms. 

Mathew work provides for the reader a wealth of information on the agricultural reform efforts of Edmund Ruffin with special emphasis on the use of Lime and Marl to alleviate the problem of soil acidity.  The author gives a new, unique look at Edmund Ruffin as a scientific observer willing to advocate radical concepts on agricultural reforms, while other historians had previously focused on the vitriolic, fire-eater eagerly pushing for secession. 

Texas Christian University                                                                     Thomas Walker

Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform. By William M. Mathew. (Athens: University of Georgia, 1988. Pp. 286)

Edmund Ruffin, best known for supposedly firing the first shot against Fort Sumter, is the subject of this well written tome. It focuses on his lifetime work as an agricultural reformer, particularly his crusade to promote marling in the worn out lands of the South. The broader question at hand for the author, Englishman William M. Mathew, is whether or not slavery itself could adapt and survive through reform. He uses Ruffin's life as a microcosm, finding that the wild haired Virginian's practices were not at fault. Instead, his efforts failed mainly due to the intangibles of slavery: lackluster entrepreneurialship, lack of transportation, and contentment with tradition.

Mathew divides his book into sections, which are then broken into chapters. Each section deals with a major step in his argument, which he lays out before his readers clearly in the introduction. Part I deals with slavery and Ruffin himself. Chapter one focuses on the historiography of the debate on slavery's adaptability and Ruffin's relation to the peculiar institution. Ruffin's reforms, it seems, are generally held to have been capable of much more than they actually achieved. Still, he conceived of them not as a way of simply improving farm production but as an actual survival mechanism to preserve slavery. It was only after the failure of his reforms that he turned to secessionism.

Chapters two and three cover Ruffin's life as an agricultural reformer and fire-eater. Son of a well off Virginia family, he virtually ignored farming until it was forced upon him at twenty years of age. Just married with children on the way, Ruffin jumped into his new life with gusto and a bent towards science. He performed a series of experiments using marl, a calcium rich substrate found on his plantation, to lower the acidity of his soil. After recording bumper crops for several years, he began writing on the subject, eventually giving up his plantation. Instead, he published the Farmer's Register, a journal dedicated to reform. Unfortunately, though those who tried his suggestions often reported astounding results, most plantation owners ignored Ruffin. A failure as a reformer, Ruffin retired and fully turned his attentions to politics. A rabid secessionist, Ruffin welcomed the war and the chance to fire what he thought to be the first shot of it. Thereafter, he was relegated to the role of spectator as armies marched back and forth across his family's plantations near Richmond. These were hard years, as he lost several of his sons in combat, as well as daughters to other, less violent, causes. After Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Ruffin committed suicide rather than live under Yankee rule.

Part's II and III are dedicated to a concise, scientific examination/explanation of Ruffin's methods and their effects. Mathew apologizes profusely for its presence, not wanting to bore his more historically minded readers. In short, Ruffin's approach drew together several strands into a logical, applicable whole. The main difficulty for southern farmers was the high acid content of their soils. Intensive farming and repeated washing through rain removes the base elements from the ground. High levels of acidity block plants' access to beneficial chemicals and cause stunted growth. Ruffin's answer was to excavate large amounts of marl, distribute it and organic material evenly across fields, then plow it all under. Then newly restored soil often proved to be productive for several decades.

Parts IV looks at the relation of slavery to agricultural reform and its ultimate inadaptability. There was no concrete, physical reason why slavery could not be used to institute Ruffin's reforms. The labor was not that specialized and most plantations had the time to implement his ideas in the slow seasons. Its real conflict came with the institutional by-products of slavery. First of all, marling was a lot of trouble, and many farmers preferred to eke out a living rather than do it. Those that did often failed to follow up with a plan of crop rotation, and continued to exploit the land as before. Slave plantations, with their reliance on self-sufficiency, had never led their owners to put much into the development of transportation. This limited the number of farmers who had practical access to marl. Finally, love of long standing traditions like slavery itself tended to lead farmers away from reform. Part V is a thorough chapter of conclusion.

Mathew provides his readers with a very interesting book, but sadly, it is ultimately unconvincing. In fact, he seems to do a great deal to prove that in practical terms slavery was very compatible with Ruffin's reforms. The slaves were entirely capable of doing the work, and more than enough time presented itself. Also, Ruffin was not peddling snake oil; his ideas could bring about marked increases in productivity. With the land regenerated, more southerners would stay in the south, giving them greater representation in Congress.

Still, it is a fact that Ruffin failed to start anything like an "agricultural revolution." Why did the majority of planters ignore his practical, demonstrably effective practices? It seems that Mathew's explanation is as good, if not better, than any other that could be offered, but his approach in demonstrating it lacks finesse. In short, he fails to drive home his point with force, however true it may be.