My colleagues Eric Muller and Sally Greene put together a wonderful symposium on North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin back in November 2007, "The Perils of Public Homage: Thomas Ruffin and State v. Mann in History and Memory." They also spoke, along with Sandy Levinson, the symposium's keynote speaker, on the npr "The State of Things," about Ruffin. The short version is that they wanted to reassess what to make of Ruffin and his opinion in State v. Mann, which became a focal point for anti-slavery writers who criticized slave law. Ruffin freed a man from criminal liability who had abused a slave in his custody. (The story's very long and is told in detail by Sally, who's done fabulous archival work on the context of the case, particularly before it went on appeal; Eric's recovered a huge amount about Ruffin, too, from his personal papers. And some other people talk about what to make of Ruffin.) Sally blogged some about it back then. The papers from that symposium are about to appear in the North Carolina Law Review. Some of them are up on ssrn already.
State v. Mann overturned a jury's conviction of John Mann for assault upon a slave he had hired from a woman named Elizabeth Jones. Historians seeking to understand the case have faced a significant hurdle: the paucity of evidence of the facts surrounding the trial. The record is not silent, however, on John Mann, Elizabeth Jones, or her wounded slave Lydia. Available evidence enables us to reconstruct sufficient facts to support tentative conclusions.
Elizabeth Jones was a minor who had inherited Lydia upon the death of her parents. She was being raised in rural Chowan County in the household of her brother-in-law, Josiah Small. Small acted in Elizabeth's interest by keeping Lydia hired out. In 1828 Lydia was hired by John Mann, a widowed and bankrupt sea captain living in Edenton. Little about John Mann would have suggested to a Chowan County judge and jury that he ought to enjoy the powers of a master.
Close study of the evidence suggests that Ruffin's reversal would have been seen in Edenton as wrong on the facts. Further study of the law of masters, hirers, and slaves suggests that the reversal was at least questionable on the law. Read in this new light, State v. Mann can be seen to stand on its own as a succinct but powerful treatise in implicit defense of slavery in terms that Ruffin's fellow planters would have readily understood. In justifying the reversal of Mann's conviction, Ruffin successfully enlists the key Burkean themes of conservative southern thought of the day, fatalistic themes emphasizing the surpassing importance of the status quo over any hope of reform. The opinion can be read as part of a broader pattern reflected in the writings of an increasingly defensive slaveholding elite; thematically it foreshadows Thomas Dew's crucially important defense of slavery in his Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. And yet Ruffin's rhetoric outdid itself. In attempting to silence any criticism of the workings of the system from which its author so clearly benefited, ironically State v. Mann may have hastened slavery's undoing.
Eric Muller's paper, "Judging Thomas Ruffin and the Hindsight Defense," is also up on ssrn. Here is his abstract:
Judge Thomas Ruffin of the antebellum North Carolina Supreme Court enjoys the reputation as one of the great judges of the nineteenth century; some rank him among the greats of all American history. This reputation has been little tarnished by his authorship of State v. Mann, an opinion that has become one of the central texts of the American law of slavery due to its savage endorsement of the right of the temporary hirer of a slave to shoot her in the back without risking criminal sanction.
Scholars have hesitated to condemn Judge Ruffin for his Mann opinion. To some extent, this is because Ruffin professed great personal anguish in that opinion at the harshness of its outcome. In addition, the archival record seemed to contain few clues (beyond the Mann opinion itself) about Ruffin's attitudes toward slavery and his own slaves. Finally, and relatedly, scholars have wished to honor what the article calls the 'hindsight defense' of historical actors - the claim that present observers cannot fairly assess the behavior of figures from the past because they will inevitably ignore the culture and morals of that earlier time.
This article reviews a great deal of newly discovered archival evidence that places Judge Ruffin and his Mann opinion in a much more troublesome light. The evidence reveals Ruffin to have been a batterer of slaves, a speculating slave-trader at a time when that trade had become disreputable, and a serial breaker of slave families. These new disclosures not only force a reconsideration of Judge Ruffin and his Mann opinion, but also suggest that the 'hindsight defense' of historical actors is often excessively simplistic and reductionist.
Other selections in this volume of the North Carolina Law Review are essays by Laura Edwards, David Lowenthal, Mark Tushnet, John Orth, and Judge James Wynn of the North Carolina Court of Appeals. I'll be blogging some more about this when the issue appears.
Ruffin ruled against Quakers in two significant court cases involving slaves being treated as free. The two cases are Contentnea Vs Dickerson, 1827 and Redmond vs Coffin, 1831. Interesting.
Posted by: Brian Hackett | April 10, 2009 at 06:12 PM