(Nov 21, 1837 - Aug 15, 1883 Wilson)
daughter of Joshua and Sally Keais Edwards Tayloe
2)Penina Ruffin of Louisburg UNC grad 1854. MD in 1857 Surgeon in CSA -
Thomas Ruffin, 1787-1870 and unpublished Manuscript by Blackwell Pierce Robinson
East Carolina Library
University bound volume consisting of typed,double-spaced,single-sided pages numbering 422 pages plus a Bibliography.
Thomas Ruffin, unlike his famous Cousin Edmund, was a fervent Unionist. It was not until after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's hurried call for 75,000 volunteers that the old Unionist declared in favor of his beloved Southland and his adopted state of North Carolina.
"Nearly three quarters of a century previously--on November 17, 1787, to be exact--he had been presented by Alice Roane Ruffin to her husband, Sterling, as their first born. Both parents were of gentle ancestry, long seated in Tidewater Virginia and long devoted to the American Cause. His father's line in this country could be traced back to Thomas' great-great-great grandfather, William Ruffin, a French Huguenot, who was living in Isle of Wight County in 1666. Intermarriage with local gentry in Isle of Wight, Surry, King William, and Did widdie Counties had upheld the position of the family throughout the succeeding century."
He was deeply religious, a devoted member of the Episcopal Church. Thirteen of his fourteen children survived him. BTW, Virginia, he attended law school at Princeton!
Edmund Ruffin's son and namesake was later to marry one of Thomas Ruffin's daughters--Jane.
By 1809 Ruffin, who early signed his letters Thomas C. Ruffin," dropped the middle name and the initial
Thomas Ruffin's father, Sterling Ruffin, was a planter of respectable fortune in neighboring Essex County. According to legend, handed down to his present-day descendants, he had enjoyed the usual cavalier pursuits of an eighteent century gentleman-- horse-racing, cock fights, a well stocked wine cellar--until on one occasion while he was taking a couple of blooded mares to Richmond for a race he was forced to spend the night in an inn or ordinary which was completely deserted except for mine host. Bored with the keeper's loquacity, he called for reading material to take to bed with him. A search of the establishment failed to reveal any printed matter except the Holy Bible. As a last resort, Sterling Ruffin is said to have opened to the book of Genesis-perhaps for the first time. So engrossed did he become that he spent the entire night, and several candles, in this fashion. And so deeply moved was he that the next day he turned his face homeward, sold his race horses, and henceforth forsook all sporting interests. Later, probably because of this over-night awakening, he (Sterling) became a Methodist minister.
While Thomas was at Princeton, he had conflicts with the President of the college-Rev. Dr. Smith who was a strong Hamiltonian Federalist and Ruffin espoused the Jeffersonian doctrine. Sterling wrote to Thomas and implored his son to conduct himself"with that respect towards him(Smith), which as a man in years and your preceptor he certainly merrits." Toward the end of his stay at Princeton, Dr. Smith had become reconciled and had adopted a friendly demeanor toward Thomas.
Thomas Ruffin's son Thomas was a Captain of the Alamance Regulators during the War Between the States.Young Ruffin had given up a Superior court Judge post in 1861 saying to his father..."North Carolina has been a generous State to you and yours, and I could never bear the idea of this war being fought through and no son of yours being in the fight" Ruffin also felt called upon to write his son in regard to his unnecessary bravery on the field. Ruffin had heard that Col Alfred M. Scales had had to rebuke him for exposing himself too much on the field and that his men had threathened "to unhorse and tie" him if he were not more prudent.
After the cataclysm of Appomatox, the world of Thomas Ruffin collapsed around him. Aged seventy-seven and the father of thirteen living children, he was still the support of his wife, two grown unmarried daughters, and two sons, William K., who had lost his leg near the hip, and Sterling, who had been blind for thirty years. Besides these he had a large number of grandchildren who were orphans or infants mostly dependent on him for nurture and education. His prospects for supporting himself and his dependents were discouraging. More than one hundred slave, nearly all of whom were born his and raised by him and representing a tremendous investment, were gone. His large investments in Confederate, North Carolina, and Virginia bonds were lost. He estimated that his losses from the war would directly or indirectly, amount probably, to the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more and that the residue of property still held by him had been so reduced in value as to render it at least doubtful, whether it could be fairly assessed for taxation of $20,000. Such a catastrophe might well have staggered a younger and a leser man, but not one of the mettle ofThomas Ruffin. Unlike his cousin, Edmund Ruffin, who committed suicide after Appomatox, the venerable Thomas Ruffin put his shoulder to the wheel and sought to gather about him what was left of his world.
Thomas Ruffin wrote a letter asking President Johnson for a pardon and received one.
The former chief Justice was buried on Monday, January 17, 1870, in the
beautiful church yard of St. Matthew's in Hillsborough, in the grounds he
had donated to it almost a half century before.
Summarized by Carol Martoccia
Thomas Ruffin, planter, jurist, and politician, was born 17 November 1787 at "Newington" in King and Queen County, Va. His parents were Sterling and Alice Roane Ruffin. Sterling Ruffin was a planter in Essex County, Va., who subsequently moved to North Carolina and died in Caswell County.
Thomas Ruffin was educated at Warrenton Academy, 1801-1803, in Warrenton, N.C. He attended Princeton University, 1803-1805, and received his A. B. He read law in Petersburg, Va., under David Robertson, 1806-1807, and in North Carolina under Archibald D. Murphy, 1807-1808. Ruffin was admitted to the bar and moved to Hillsborough, N.C., in 1809.
Ruffin married Anne McNabb Kirkland (1794-1875) on 7 December 1809. Anne Kirkland was the daughter of William Kirkland, a Hillsborough merchant, and his wife, Margaret Scott Kirkland. Thomas and Anne Ruffin had fourteen children--Catherine Roane, William Kirkland, Anne, Alice Roane, Sterling, Peter Browne, George McNeill, Elizabeth, Thomas, Susan Mary, Jane Minerva, Martha (Patty) Phebe, John Kirkland, and Sarah (Sally) Nash Ruffin. Anne Ruffin's nephew, Duncan K. MacRae, lived with the Ruffins for several years after his mother died.
For most of his adult life, Ruffin owned two plantations--one in Rockingham County and the Hermitage in Alamance County, N.C. Ruffin was an agicultural innovator and a pioneer in scientific farming. He planted a variety of crops, looked for new ways to improve his soil through fertilizers, and maintained close contact with his cousin, Edmund Ruffin, a noted antebellum agricultural reformer. He served as President of the North Carolina Agricultural Society from 1854 until 1860.
While living in Hillsborough, Ruffin served, 1813-1815, in the House of Commons. He was a presidential elector on the Monroe ticket in 1816. He was elected Judge of the Superior Court, 1818; reporter of the Supreme Court of N.C., 1820-1822; candidate for presidential elector on the Crawford ticket, 1824; and was elected again as Judge of the Superior Court in 1825. Ruffin resigned from the bench and became President of the State Bank of North Carolina in 1828. His tenure as bank executive was shortlived. He was elected Judge of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in 1829 and became Chief Justice in 1833.
As a jurist, Ruffin was renowned for adapting established English common law standards to the constantly changing judicial conditions in the new United States. Some of his most famous decisions were: Hoke v. Henderson, Raleigh and Gaston Railroad Company v. Davis, and State v. Mann. State v. Mann was Ruffin's most notorious case. Ruffin's decision stated that "the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect."
Ruffin retired from the bench in 1852. In 1858, the state legislature again elected him chief justice, but Ruffin resigned after one year.
A Unionist, Ruffin was a North Carolina delegate to the Washington Peace Conference in February 1861, where he sought to avert war. After the failure of this last effort at compromise, Ruffin was a delegate to the North Carolina Secession Convention, where he supported secession based on the right of revolution rather than the right of secession. Once secession was a fact, Ruffin strongly supported the Confederate cause.
After the war, Ruffin moved from the Hermitage into Hillsborough and remained there until his death on 15 January 1870.
For additional information on the Ruffin family and related families, see the Cameron Family Papers (#133) and the Ruffin, Roulhac, and Hamilton Family Papers (#643) in the Southern Historical Collection and Jean Bradley Anderson, The Kirklands of Ayr Mount.
Biographical information sources: Sean Christopher Walker, "The
Lawyer may be altogether sunk in the Farmer: Thomas Ruffin,
Planter of Antebellum North Carolina" (Unpublished Honors Thesis,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994): 66-67.
William S. Powell, ed. Dictionary of North Carolina Biography,
Volume 5 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1994): 266-268.
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