The NC Supreme Court must render a verdict on a jurist from its past, Thomas Ruffin

Generations of North Crolina’s leading jurists believed that Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, who served on the state Supreme Court from 1829 to 1855, embodies our state’s highest ideals of justice. He also represents one of its darkest chapters.

An enormous painting of Ruffin still casts its long shadow over our highest court, high above the bench, peering over the shoulder of current Chief Justice Cheri Beasley. Every person who seeks justice before the court does so eye to eye with Ruffin, whose notorious 1829 decision in State v. Mann was, according to legal scholars Sally Greene and Eric Muller, “undoubtedly the coldest and starkest defense of the brutality of slavery every to appear in an American judicial opinion.”

As our court considers a vote to remove Ruffin’s portrait, his admirers argue that the jurist was merely “a man of his times,” a slaveholder in a slave society. His peers did not agree. A June 3, 1824 letter to Ruffin from a white neighbor complained of practices “too cruel to be put on paper,” but wrote of bloody whippings, burning the skin of the enslaved, the use of red pepper and salt on their wounds—an overseer “literally barbecuing, peppering and salting” Ruffin’s slaves. Ruffin’s correspondence with his wife the year before shows clearly that he was not likely shocked by this news.

Because his peers, even slaveholders, regarded the slave trade as morally repugnant, Ruffin trafficked in Black bodies in secret. Through an agent, he sold Black people from the Upper South at vast profits to Alabama and Mississippi. Ruffin tore enslaved children from the arms of their parents and separated enslaved wives and husbands from one another. He believed that, since profits constituted the essence of the institution, this should be the accepted practice.

Even these cruelties pale beside Ruffin’s most influential decision in State v. Mann, which reshaped the laws of slavery to unleash unrestrained violence against the enslaved. A harsh master, John Mann, prepared to punish an enslaved woman, Lydia, and she fled. Enraged, Mann shot Lydia, inflicting a terrible wound. A local jury found him guilty of assault and battery. Mann’s appeal gave Chief Justice Ruffin the opportunity to sweep away paternalist delusions and plumb the depths of its inherent inhumanity.

With slavery, Ruffin argues: “The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public safety; the [slave], one doomed in his own person and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another man reap the fruits.”

The enslaved will never accept the plunder of themselves and their posterity, Ruffin reasoned, but the logic enslavement requires the dire and constant threat of unspeakable violence by the master.

“There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect... This discipline belongs to the state of slavery.” State v. Mann thus declares for the ages that no master should ever be called into court to answer for brutality, no matter how vicious, against a human being, so long as the assailant held a deed to that person.

Not merely a “man of his times,” Ruffin was a violent and influential extremist in the disputes of his day over slavery

Ruffin’s current defenders say that those who cannot abide his portrait in a courtroom wish to “erase history.” His champions have scrubbed Ruffin’s story in official histories and cling to deceits and distortions; the case for which he is most remembered, State v. Mann, is not even mentioned on our Supreme Court’s website. Ruffin belongs not in the halls of justice but in the halls of history, where we can have the honest and complex conversations this history urgently demands.

To hold Thomas Ruffin in a place of highest honor in our Supreme Court undermines the moral authority of our courts and the principle of equality before the law at a critical hour when many citizens—especially our young people—regard that ideal as a quaint notion, if not merely a centuries-old fraud.

This particular Supreme Court now comes to an end and its members must decide whether to keep Ruffin’s likeness on the walls of our highest court. If they decline to choose, this issue will remain unresolved for many years; the only moral clarity will come through the anger of the young we can betray or not. To remain silent will speak volumes about our vision of the fragile democracy seeking rebirth in this hour of national crisis. We will remember who found the wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour.

This story was originally published December 20, 2020 at 9:32 PM.