Abolitionist lawyers in the antebellum era made a practice of representing fugitive slaves and rescuers in the North, but African-Americans had some access to courts even in the southern states. The attorneys in those cases typically had no objection to the institution of slavery – for the most part, they enthusiastically supported it – but instead were motivated by respect for the law and, unsurprisingly, the prospect of earning a fee. One such case involved Allen and Temperance Jones, whose quest for freedom ultimately played a small role in sparking the Civil War.
Allen Jones was born a slave in North Carolina in 1794. A skilled blacksmith, he shod horses as extra work in the evenings and on Sundays and was allowed – as was a common incentive – to keep a portion of the money he was paid. He eventually earned the $685 needed to purchase his freedom, but he was swindled by his owner who took the money and refused to sign the deed of manumission. Jones “could not possibly have earned that much unless he did it on his master’s time,” claimed the slave owner. Undeterred, Jones kept working and, with the help of white friends, he again saved enough money to buy his freedom, which his master could not deny a second time. Continuing to work – and now able to keep all of his earnings – Jones managed to accumulate the $3000 necessary to free his wife and three children.
This time, however, Jones took no chances on the slaveowner’s honesty. Rather than simply handing over the cash in exchange for a promise of manumission, he insisted on purchasing his wife, Temperance, and their children, who became his own slaves. With the assistance of several well-connected lawyers, Jones then petitioned the county court for an order of emancipation. The court papers recited his ownership of “several negro slaves to wit: Tempe, Munro, Betheny, and Burnham,” explaining that they were his wife and children, and vouching for Tempe’s “upright character.” He added that her service toward her former owner had been “dutiful, faithful, and highly meritorious.” Obsequiousness was not in Allen Jones’s nature, but the circumstances left him no choice but to “humbly pray . . . for the liberation of his said slaves.”
The petition was prepared in the law office of Thomas Ruffin, to be presented in the November 1829 term of the Raleigh Superior Court. The reference to Tempe’s “meritorious service” was a legal necessity because a North Carolina statute would otherwise have required her, as a newly emancipated slave, to leave the state within 90 days.
As many readers will recognize, Thomas Ruffin was no particular friend of African Americans – he owned two plantations with over 100 slaves – and it is one of history’s ironies that he once represented the freedom-seeking Allen Jones. At the time, Ruffin was among the most prominent lawyers in the state, representing landowners, merchants, and other members of the Carolina gentry. He had recently been appointed to the presidency of the State Bank of North Carolina, which had been on the verge of collapse due to a series of improvident loans to slave dealers. Ruffin successfully reorganized the bank’s affairs to the great relief of the state’s commercial and financial interests.
Ruffin was rewarded for his efforts with an appointment to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which was confirmed by the legislature on November 24, 1829, shortly after he drafted the petition to emancipate Temperance Jones and her children. Ruffin took his seat in December, and within weeks he issued one of the most profoundly pro-slavery decisions of the antebellum era. In State v.Mann, he held that a slaveholder could not be prosecuted for shooting a disobedient slave. As he explained for the court, "the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” Ruffin did express sympathy for unprotected slaves who could be subjected to “incidences of cruelty and deliberate barbarity” at the hands of cruel owners, but he concluded that such “uncontrolled authority” was nonetheless “inherent in the relation of master and slave.”
Although Ruffin remains best known today for his absolutist view of slavery, it was not out of character for him to have accepted a fee for pursuing Allen Jones’s right as a master to manumit his own wife and children. Ruffin might also have had a more elevated motive, at least at the outset of the representation. According to his ledger notes, Ruffin initially believed that the case involved an “attempt to imprison a Free Negro,” and he might have accepted the case on that mistaken basis.
In 1843, fourteen years after gaining the family’s freedom, and following the birth of another son, the Joneses moved to Oberlin, Ohio. Four of their children would graduate from Oberlin College, which made them one of the best educated African-American families in the antebellum United States. Their oldest son, James Monroe (called “Munro” in the Ruffin petition) later moved to Canada where he became a renowned gunsmith. In 1858, “Gunsmith” Jones was a delegate to John Brown’s Chatham Convention and a signatory to Brown’s Provisional Constitution of the United States. He also supplied some of the firearms that were used at Harper’s Ferry.
The Ruffin family remained active in southern politics. Thomas’s cousin Edmund Ruffin, a secessionist firebrand, was given the honor of firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. Neither of the Ruffin cousins ever knew of the indirect role that attorney Thomas Ruffin had played in arming John Brown. (I learned about the Ruffin-Jones connection when researching my next book, The “Colored Hero” of Harper’s Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War against Slavery, to be published in 2015 by Cambridge.)
A great story! Thanks.
Posted by: Bill Turnier | September 03, 2014 at 08:01 AM
This is a really interesting story -- let me begin by saying that my colleague Eric Muller has an excellent article that discusses how Ruffin treated his own enslaved humans (not well is the short version). This raises for me the question, again, of whether lawyers who represented slaves (or free people) often (or ever) had an ideological commitment to the anti-slavery cause. Obviously the answer for Ruffin is no, though this may be yet another instance in which a personal connection causes someone to rethink his position (at least in one instance).
Posted by: Alfred L. Brophy | September 03, 2014 at 01:15 PM
It's weird to me in that if a master has the right to kill a slave at will, that master should also have the right to do pretty much anything else at will, including lying, cheating and swindling the slave.
Posted by: Barry | September 03, 2014 at 06:29 PM