In “Blood Among the Tulip Trees,” the chap­ter unfolds the har­row­ing tale of Edmund Ruf­fin and his fam­i­ly’s tur­moil dur­ing the Civ­il War as Union forces forced them to aban­don their Marl­bourne and Beech­wood plan­ta­tions. With the Union sol­diers made their griev­ances known against Ruf­fin for insti­gat­ing seces­sion and fir­ing the first shot at Fort Sumter, Beech­wood par­tic­u­lar­ly became a point of hos­til­i­ty. When Ruf­fin and his son Edmund, Jr., returned to their plan­ta­tion, they dis­cov­ered a scene of dev­as­ta­tion: feath­ers lit­tered the lawn, the inte­ri­or was van­dal­ized, and per­son­al belong­ings were stolen, leav­ing them with a haunt­ing sense of vio­la­tion.

The sol­diers’ dis­dain man­i­fest­ed in their graf­fi­ti, sign­ing names and leav­ing obscen­i­ties on the walls, with one sol­dier explic­it­ly demon­strat­ing his con­tempt for Ruffin’s actions. The emo­tion­al toll inten­si­fied for Ruf­fin on Jan­u­ary 5, 1863, as he learned of his daugh­ter Mildred’s death, fur­ther deep­en­ing his sense of iso­la­tion and unrec­og­nized con­tri­bu­tions to the Con­fed­er­ate cause. Despite being laud­ed as a hero, he reflect­ed on how his life might have been for­got­ten with­out this noto­ri­ety.

As the war took a dev­as­tat­ing turn, Ruf­fin suf­fered anoth­er per­son­al blow with the death of his son Julian in bat­tle. By this point, liv­ing in a refuge pro­vid­ed by his son Edmund, Jr., Ruf­fin was weary and bur­dened by age and lone­li­ness. He expressed a long­ing for death, stat­ing that he sought to end his own life, fueled by a boil­ing resent­ment against Union rule and the per­ceived betray­al of his fel­low Vir­gini­ans.

On June 18, 1865, after main­tain­ing a diary for over sev­en years filled with his stri­dent anti-Union sen­ti­ments, he pre­pared to take his own life. He metic­u­lous­ly set up his mus­ket but faced a failed attempt at first. How­ev­er, per­se­ver­ing, Ruf­fin ulti­mate­ly suc­ceed­ed, result­ing in a trag­ic end to a life steeped in con­tro­ver­sy and regret, marked by the grim after­math described in a con­tem­po­rary news­pa­per account .