Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue

By Sally Greene

Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History
by Sally Greene

North Carolina's State Capitol still houses a statue to one of southern history's most notorious pro-slave-owner judges. Why?

"Ruffin was ideologically sympathetic to the Confederate cause and remained so to his death. 'The power of the master must be absolute,' Ruffin wrote in State v. Mann (1829), 'to render the submission of the slave perfect.' State v. Mann became the most notorious opinion in the entire body of slavery law."

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807882801

Sally Greene

Sally Greene is an independent scholar who specializes in the literature of twentieth-century British and American women. She is editor of Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, and her essays have appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Cultures, the American Scholar, and elsewhere.

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