REAR COVER NOTES: Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865) was a Virginia gentleman and one of the most radical of the Southern leaders, and an important Southern agricultural reformer before the Civil War. When the war broke out, it was he who fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, and when his cause failed, he died by his own hand. Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study in Secession treats him not so much as an individual as the archetype of the emotional Southern radical of his era.