The patriotic people of the county of Rockingham, in a public assemblage at their first Superior Court after the death of Chief Justice Ruffin, in which they were joined with cordial sympathy by the gentlemen of the bar at that court, resolved to manifest their appreciation of his talents, virtues and public usefulness, by causing to be pronounced a memorial on his life and character. Such an offering was deemed by them a fitting tribute from a people among whom his family first settled, upon their arrival in North Carolina, and with whom he had been associated as a planter and cultivator of the soil from his early manhood till his decease. The Agricultural Society of the State, of which for many years he had been a distinguished president, subsequently determined on a like offering to his memory at their annual fair. The invitation to prepare such a discourse has been by both bodies extended to the same individual. The task is undertaken with diffidence and a sense of apprehension that amid the multiplicity of other engagements its fulfillment may fail in doing justice to the subject of this memoir. Thomas Ruffin, the eldest child of his parents, was born at Newington, the residence of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Roane, in the county of King and Queen, in Virginia, on the 17th of November, 1787. His father, Sterling Ruffin, Esquire, was a planter in the neighboring county of Essex, who subsequently transferred his residence to North Carolina, and died in the county of Caswell. Ardent in his religious sentiments, and long attached to the Methodist Episcopal Church, he very late in life entered the ministry, and was for a few years prior to his death a preacher in that denomination. His mother, Alice Roane, was of a family much distinguished in Virginia by the public service of many of its members, and was herself first cousin of Spencer Roane, the Chief Justice of that State, in the past generation, whose judicial course, connected as it was with questions of difficulty and importance in constitutional law, gave him high professional, as well as political, distinction; but it may well be doubted whether, in all that constitutes a great lawyer, he had preeminence over the subject of our present sketch, his junior kinsman in North Carolina, then but rising into fame, and destined to fill the like office in his own State.