The University of North Carolina School of Law, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities present The Perils of Public Homage: State v. Mann and Thomas Ruffin in History and Memory November 16, 2007 Visit http://www.unc.edu/depts/csas/Conferences/ruffin.html for more information. 9:00 a.m. Morning welcome: Harry L. Watson, Director, Center for the Study of the American South, and John McGowan, Director, UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities 9:15 a.m. Keynote Address: Sanford Levinson --- Creative Destruction and Public Honor 10:10 a.m. Panel I: Ruffin and State v. Mann in Ruffin's World Sally Greene: "Committed upon the Body of one Negro Slave Lydia": Gleanings from The Edenton Trial of State v. Mann Eric Muller: Judging Thomas Ruffin and the Hindsight Defense Laura Edwards: The Forgotten Legal World of Thomas Ruffin: The Power of Presentism on the History of Slave Law Adrienne Davis: Of Pedagogy & "Pure Property": Conceptions of Slavery and Power in State v. Mann Panel moderator: Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, UNC-CH 12:15 p.m. Lunch break (on your own) 1:30 p.m. Afternoon welcome: John Charles Boger, Dean, UNC School of Law 1:40 p.m. The Honorable James A. Wynn, Jr. --- State v. Mann: Judicial Choice or Judicial Duty? 2:10 p.m. Panel II: Ruffin and State v. Mann in Our World Mark Tushnet: Judge Ruffin and the Foresight Worry David Lowenthal: Arraigning Ancestors Bernard Boxill: Thomas Ruffin, the Humanity of Slaves, and Arguments for Slave Reparations Alfred Brophy: Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments Panel moderator: John V. Orth, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Law, UNC-CH 4:30 p.m. Closing On Saturday, November 17, interested people will gather at 9:00 a.m. at Cup a Joe, 120 West King Street in Hillsborough, for a day of visits to sites of historical interest, including Thomas Ruffin's law office, gravesite, and home, Hillsborough's slave cemetery, and the main house and slave quarters at the Stagville Plantation in Durham. If you are interested in joining the trip, please tell Sally Greene or Eric Muller. Transportation on your own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Speakers Bernard Boxill is the Pardue Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in social and political philosophy and African American philosophy. He is the author of Blacks and Social Justice (1984) and the editor of Race and Racism (2001). Alfred Brophy is a Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. He has written extensively on race and property law in colonial, antebellum, and early twentieth-century America. His books are Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2002) and Reparations Pro and Con (2006). Adrienne Davis is the Reef C. Ivey II Research Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Her scholarship emphasizes the gendered and private law dimensions of American slavery, as well as theories of commodification, law and literature, and reparations. She is an editor of Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America (1996) and author of many law review articles, including "The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective" in the Stanford Law Review. Laura Edwards is a Professor of History at Duke University. Her research focuses on women, gender, and the law in the nineteenth-century American South. She is the author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997) and Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women and the Civil War Era (2000). Sally Greene is an independent scholar, adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, attorney, and member of the Chapel Hill Town Council. She has published widely on literary and historical topics. Her edited anthology Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance was published in 1999. Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair at the University of Texas School of Law. The author of over 250 articles and book reviews in professional and popular journals, Levinson has also written four books: Constitutional Faith (1988); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); and, most recently, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (2006). David Lowenthal is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at University College London. He has written a great number of articles and books, including two concerning the relationship between history and cultural heritage --- The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998) and The Past Is a Foreign Country (1986). Eric L. Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He writes principally about the legal history of the Japanese American internment of World War II and about the memory and evaluation of historic injustice. His books are Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (2001) and American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (2007). Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is one of the nation's leading scholars of constitutional law and legal history. His many books include A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law (2005) and The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860 (1992). The Honorable James A. Wynn, Jr. is a judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He has also served as an Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court and as a Certified Military Trial Judge in the U.S. Navy Reserves. Judge Wynn has served on a number of committees and sections of the American Bar Association, including its Judicial Division, as well as on a number of committees of the National Conference of Uniform State Laws. He has published articles on judicial selection and diversity in several law reviews. Thanks and Credits Sally Greene and Eric Muller would like to thank the UNC School of Law, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities for generously supporting this conference, and the North Carolina Law Review for publishing the conference papers. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Ackland Art Museum, Andrew Pham, Charles Story, Matt Marvin, Elizabeth Gingold, Dan Choi, Beth Trivette, Kelley Gondring, David Huyck, Debbie Edge, The Rev. Brooks Graebner, Michael Malone, and Maureen Quilligan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thomas Ruffin, 1787-1870 Thomas Ruffin was born in Newington, Virginia, to Sterling Ruffin, a planter who became a Methodist minister late in life, and Alice Roane Ruffin, a member of a prominent Virginia family. The young Ruffin attended Warrenton Academy in Warrenton, North Carolina, and the College of Nassau Hall at Princeton, New Jersey, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1805. He studied law first under David Robertson in Petersburg, Virginia, and then under Archibald D. Murphey in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he opened a law office in 1809. That same year he married Anne Kirkland, the daughter of a Hillsborough merchant. They would have fourteen children together. In addition to his busy law practice, Ruffin maintained two plantations, one in Alamance County and one in Rockingham County. He left mostly to overseers the care of his farmlands and the discipline of his slaves, of whom he owned about three dozen by the 1830s. For several years in the 1820s, Ruffin was also in the slave-trading business; a partner bought slaves where they were cheap in the Upper South and sold them at a profit in South Carolina and Alabama. Ruffin eagerly sought a role in public life. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1813 and to the superior court bench in 1816 and again in 1825. He resigned his judgeship in 1828 to become president of the State Bank of North Carolina, but served in that position only until the end of 1829, when he was elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court. He became Chief Justice in 1833, holding that position until his first retirement from the court in 1852. The General Assembly called him from retirement on his Alamance plantation back to the Chief Justiceship late in 1858, but he retired from the Supreme Court permanently in the fall of 1859. He also served for 42 years on the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina. Thomas Ruffin was a unionist delegate to the Washington Peace Conference in February of 1861, but when efforts to avert war failed, he served as a delegate to the North Carolina Secession Convention in June of 1861 and strongly supported the Confederate cause. Ruffin disposed of his Alamance plantation after the war and returned to Hillsborough, where he lived until his death in 1870 at the age of 82. State v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 (December Term 1829) John Mann rented a slave named Lydia from her owner for the year 1828 in Chowan County, North Carolina. Lydia ran off one day while Mann was disciplining her. Mann shot her in the back as she ran, wounding but not killing her. A jury of twelve convicted Mann of the crime of battery for this shooting and fined him five dollars. Mann appealed his conviction to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Had Mann not been Lydia's owner, North Carolina law would plainly have condemned this battery. On the other hand, had Mann been Lydia's permanent owner, North Carolina law would clearly have exonerated him. Mann was neither; he was a temporary owner, a leaseholder. State v. Mann therefore appeared to present the question of whether a leaseholder could be convicted of battery for injuring a slave. Writing the North Carolina Supreme Court's opinion, Thomas Ruffin cast the legal question more broadly, effacing the potential distinction between temporary and permanent ownership. The common law could not criminalize any owner's brutality toward his slave, Ruffin held. Slaves could be compelled to a lifetime of work only if they lacked independent will, and the only way to strip them of will was to confer on the slave's owner an "uncontrolled authority of [her] body." "The power of the master must be absolute," Ruffin wrote, "to render the submission of the slave perfect." And that power insulated the owner from criminal responsibility even for "instances of cruelty and deliberate barbarity." The legislature might, if it wished, pass a statute extending the crime of battery to reach a slave owner. But a court could not do so through a judicial opinion. The Chambers of the Dialectic Society and the Ruffin Portrait We gather today on the top floor of New West in the chamber of the Dialectic Society, one of the two student debating societies that has existed on the UNC campus since the 1790s. (The other is the Philanthropic Society; its chamber sits atop New East.) The Dialectic Society has met in this chamber since New West's opening in 1860. At one time, this chamber and its twin in New East were called "the grandest rooms in the state." The chamber is furnished with fifty mahogany desks, copies of those in the State Capitol. The furniture on the dais has been in use by the Societies' officers since 1848. On the walls hang portraits of some of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies' distinguished alumni. The portrait of Judge Ruffin that stands at the front of the chamber today was commissioned from the artist William Hart in the early 1840s. We are grateful to the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies for allowing us to meet in this beautiful space and to use and display Judge Ruffin's portrait..