ABSTRACT
At the end of April 1860, Edmund Ruffin had completed a 400-page manuscript, titled Anticipations of the Future, where he correctly predicted Abraham Lincoln would be elected in the fall of that year, triggering a civil war that would start at Ft. Sumter. Ruffin yanked the lanyard of a Columbiad cannon that started the Civil War. He, joined by fellow fire-eater Roger Pryor, traveled to South Carolina to urge it to act. Pryor's advocacy for states' rights in The South, a newspaper he launched in 1857, won him a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives. Following Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, both men insisted a Confederate attack on Ft. Sumter, built on a sandbar at the entrance to Charleston's Harbor, would force Virginia to join its sister states. Northern slaves who fought in the American Revolution won their freedom. The new nation banned slavery in 1787 throughout its Northwest Territory.
