The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

The surge and retreat of Union forces across Virginia forced Edmund Ruffin and his family to flee his Marlbourne and Beechwood plantations. When Union soldiers occupied them, they made it clear they bore a grievance against the family, especially Edmund, for his role as an instigator of secession and for having triggered the Civil War with that first shot at Fort Sumter. Beechwood in particular became the object of their animus. On August 17, a Sunday, Ruffin and his son Edmund, Jr., rode to the plantation after receiving word that it had recently been evacuated by its Yankee occupiers. They found the lawn strewn with feathers from ruptured featherbeds. To Ruffin the pattern of damage revealed something other than simple plunder: This was personal. His bookcases and desk were broken and twenty years of correspondence stolen. Many other items had disappeared as well, including all the bells the Ruffins had used to summon their slaves. The occupiers saved their worst for the interior walls. Soldiers used these as a target for spitting wads of chewed tobacco and appeared to have taken particular effort to do so. They signed their names—Ruffin counted thirty-one—and scrawled obscenities. It was here that the soldiers’ enmity toward him, personally, bore clearest expression. One soldier cut to the heart of it: “You did fire the first gun on Sumter, you traitor son of a bitch.”

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