[2] Although a slaveholder (and whose family had long owned slaves), Ruffner became known for criticizing slavery as impeding Virginia's economic development before the American Civil War, although that controversial position caused him to resign his college presidency and retire to his farm.

In 1794, his grandfather, Joseph Ruffner Sr., bought land across the Appalachian Mountains in the Kanawha River Valley from John Dickinson, including a famous salt spring.

[6][5] David Ruffner received the property closest to the future capital city of Charleston, West Virginia (the whole bottom from the mouth of Campbell's Creek to the cross line above Malden), including the famous salt lick, which his father had allowed Elisha Brooks to lease and try to develop.

McElhenney, a South Carolininan who had graduated from Washington College and then been sent by the Lexington Presbytery across the Appalachians to Greenbrier and Monroe Counties, had settled the previous year.

[15] In the 1860 federal census, the 70 year old reverend and his 32 year old wife Laura J Ruffner were living with James and Eliza Gaines' family at the Kanawha salines, at which time Ruffner owned $13,000 of real estate and $3,000 in personal property (which technically could include slaves, although he is absent from the corresponding slave schedules, and the listed head-of-household Gaines had no real nor personal property).

"[17] In 1819, in addition to his duties at various churches in the area, and with his family's farms, Ruffner returned to Washington College as a professor of ancient languages, holding that post until 1837, during which time he twice served as acting president.

[18] In 1837 Ruffner became the college's president and delivered an inaugural address that emphasized such classic themes as self-control and the importance of education in guiding American society.

At the time, his son William H. Ruffner, had withdrawn from Princeton University because of ill health, though he traveled in Montgomery County Maryland collecting manumitted slaves for emigration to Liberia as an agent of the American Colonization Society.

This moderate anti-slavery position seems to have represented something of a change because in 1839 Ruffner had published a novella, Judith Bensaddi whose title character argued against abolition of slavery.

He was replaced by George Junkin, then president of Lafayette College, who had lost his job at Miami University in Ohio a few years early for his pro-slavery views.