History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most aggressive ""fire-eaters."" This volume of Ruffin's work offers us his less known but equally intense passion for agricultural study. In carefully edited selections from Ruffin's writings, Jack Temple Kirby presents a portrait of an innovative, progressive agronomist and pioneering conservationist. Arranged in sections discussing southern agricultural history, Ruffin's observations on nature, his ideas about land reform, and his plans for soil rejuvenation, ""Nature's Management"" shows that Ruffin was a thinker far ahead of his time who recognized our need to improve agriculture and to protect nature.