Talk:Edmund Ruffin
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More info at Find-A-Grave. Lincher 14:08, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
Although flagged for 'weasel-words' the problem with the article is less with the tone than the focus. Ruffin was just one of many planters who avidly believed in seccession, etc. The reason he was granted the privelege of touching off the cannon that opened the battery of Fort Sumter was because of the respect he earned as an agronomist. He was noteworthy for being effectively untrained as a scientist and functioning outside of the scientific community of the day. This didn't prevent him from producing one of the most important agricultural monographs for several decades. Repeated growth of the same crop (tobacco, usually) on the land with no fallow or intercropping depleted the land of calcium and (I believe) generated organic acids. He discovered that application of "calcareous manures" could greatly incease soil fertility. Calcareous manures were lime deposits or other soils with high amounts of alkaline matter, easily found in Tidewater areas with millenia of oyster beds and clay. The economic benefit can hardly be understated. He revitalized Southern agriculture, esp. large scale agriculture of cash crops like cotton and tobacco. This increased again the need for slaves, which had been in decline along with the productivity of the farms that would employ slaves. (An author could compare this, in passing, to the modern situation of large-scale agriculture displacing smaller farming.) His discovery, the quality of the research and dissemination of this discovery, and his great dedication to the advancement of agriculture that earned hiim the respect to be taken seriously in his fiery seccessional talk, rather than just as another loquacious rich planter or loud rebel. The honor of firing the opening salvo of the War was given to him because he was so rabidly in favor of seccession, but to him specifically instead of the great many people who shared those views because of his agricultural studies. This should be his place in history -- not merely for being a 'rebel'.
76.215.209.66 06:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC) Firestone (aka NotTires)
Category Should be changed to include agricultural / scientific biography and remove one or so of the political cateogries as well. 76.215.209.66 06:22, 8 January 2007 (UTC)Firestone (aka NotTires)
I put some work in this article to "tone it down" a bit, and I added some citations and turned some words into Wikipedia links. I'm going to remove the weasel tag. As I originally found this article, it didn't merely have weasel words, it had used a lot of the rhetoric of the "lost cause" and slavery apologists, but never even mentioned that Ruffin was a slaveholder! He seemed like just a good ole lover of the South. Since the article has been changed (and in my mind, improved) a lot, I'm taking the tag out. What has been hard to do is remove the weasel words yet keep the color of the original article authors' enthusiasm for Ruffin and retain a sense of Ruffin's extreme partisanship. JohnnE 17:57, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
