Abstract
Edmund Ruffin is best known as an inflammatory southern secessionist whose fortunes rose and fell with the South's struggle to break away from the Union. In 1861, he was in Charleston, South Carolina to fire the first cannon barrage at the federal forces stationed at Fort Sumter. In 1865, after the defeat of the Confederacy, Ruffin committed suicide at his plantation in his beloved Virginia because he did not want to live under "Yankee tyranny." Today, he is a symbol of the South's demise and of the "Lost Cause," despite the best efforts of his biographers to move beyond this one-dimensional rendering. Before turning to Ruffin's fictional response to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it is important to understand these two episodes in the context of his overall life.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
25
Issue
3
First Page
50
Last Page
52
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Lewis, Dan
(1993)
"for Edmund Ruffin,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 25:
No.
3, Article 17.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol25/iss3/17
Copyright
©1993 Iowa Communication Association
