Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South

In 1818, Edmund Ruffin, then a young Virginia planter, began conducting chemical and rotational experiments on his Coggin's Point plantation on the James River. Tracing Ruffin's passionate advocacy of both agricultural reform and slavery, William M. Mathew pinpoints in this book many of the contradictions that underlay the economic and social structures of the antebellum South.