A Secessionist’s Anticipations of the Future: A Civil War in which slaves support slavery

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By the end of the Civil War, approximately 200,000 African American men had enlisted in the United States armed forces. Tens of thousands more provided civilian labor as teamsters, construction workers, cooks, and in other roles. As much as 75% of these men were from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The extent of Southern negro support for the United States war effort left many white southerners flabbergasted. They had convinced themselves that enslaved southerners were happy and content with their condition, and would be loyal to their masters in the event of a war between Northern and Southern whites.

One of those who was so convinced was Edmund Ruffin. According to Wiki,

Edmund Ruffin (January 5, 1794 – June 18, 1865) was a wealthy Virginia planter and slaveholder, who in the 1850s was a political activist with the so-called Fire-Eaters. He staunchly advocated states' rights and slavery, arguing for secession years before the American Civil War. Ruffin is often credited with "firing the first shot of the war" at the Battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861; he served as a Confederate soldier despite his advanced age. When the war ended in Southern defeat in 1865, he committed suicide rather than submit to "Yankee rule."

Ruffin's chief legacy is his pioneering work in methods to preserve and improve soil productivity; he recommended crop rotation and additions to restore soils exhausted from tobacco monoculture. Early in his career, he studied bogs and swamps to learn how to correct soil acidity. He published essays and, in 1832, a book on his findings for improving soils. He has since become known as "the father of soil science" in the United States.​

In advance of the Civil War, but immediately after the raid on Harpers Ferry led by John Brown, Ruffin wrote Anticipations of the Future to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. The book imagines a future in which the North and the South go to war.

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The story of Ruffin's alleged "first shot" is beyond the scope of this post, at least for the moment. But suffice it to say, he did inject himself into the happenings at Ft Sumter, where the USA/CSA shooting war began.
From Blue Gray Review

In his book, published in 1860, Ruffin wrote a series of fictional dispatches sent to a British newspaper, which detailed a Civil War between the North and the South. The book imagines that after Abraham Lincoln serves a single term in office, William Seward, a pro-abolition New Yorker who was Lincoln's Secretary of State, becomes the next president. President Seward implements a number of policies which are clearly anti-slavery, to the chagrin of white southerners. The southerners feel they have no choice but to secede. War soon follows.

In Ruffin's version of the future, Northern attempts to preserve the Union fail horribly for a number of reasons, one of those being widespread support for the Confederacy from enslaved people. Or more precisely, the Confederacy gains from widespread loyalty of enslaved people to their enslavers.

The following excepts from the book illustrate Ruffin's rendering of a civil war in which the slaves' desire for bondage tilts the war in the Confederacy's favor. Again these are fictionalized accounts of war between the North and South; these excerpts are about the North's failed invasion of Kentucky.

- More to come -

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Alan
 
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