"Traces of the Trade" in Hillsborough Sept. 6

A couple of months ago, Al blogged about "Traces of the Trade," a documentary made by a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, "the largest slave trading family in U.S. history" according to the film. The documentary follows the steps of the filmmaker Katrina Browne and a handful of other descendants as they retrace the paths over which this trading took place: from Bristol, Rhode Island to Ghana to the Caribbean.

The film premiered at Sundance and has been shown on PBS (see trailer). And because the family included a good number of Episcopal priests, it has been taken up by the Episcopal Church nationally as part of the church's ongoing work of reconciliation with its complicity with slavery and racism.

On Sept. 6, as part of a conversation sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina at St. Matthew's church in Hillsborough, the film will be shown. After the film, I'll be part of a panel discussion--in which I'll be bringing our own Thomas Ruffin to the table.

Independence Day in Hillsborough

What could be better for someone who studies history and cemeteries than an Independence Day visit to the grave of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence?! Not much, I imagine. Hence, I set off on Friday morning to visit Hillsborough. Hillsborough, of course, is where Thomas Ruffin lived and where several of the "Regulators" were hanged after their rebellion was put down in 1771.
In the church yard of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, Thomas Hooper--a signer of the Declaration--was buried in 1790. Was buried is the operative term--he was exhumed and reburied in Greensboro in 1894 (as part of the creation of a park to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle fought there). I'm not a huge fan of reburials to create a new park--seems like the attempt to "manufacture" gravitas--and it's done at the expense of a dead person, who obviously can't object. But then if the relevant family members are ok with it, that's all that's required by law.
Anyway, the church yard is lovely and I saw the place where Hooper had been buried. (He's a pretty interesting guy, btw--born in Boston and educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard, then trained in law with James Otis and relocated to North Carolina in the 1760s. Hooper was initially closely tied to the colonial government, then slowly came over the Revolutionary cause, and after the war was a Federalist.)
(This is cross-posted from propertyprof.)

Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in June and though my favorite librarian recently told me I should be relaxing now that I'm moved into Chapel Hill, I'm sweating out a paper for a colloquium next week. It's going to be about University, Court, and Slave. I'm trying to get the introduction written so I can distribute it on Monday. But instead of doing that, I'm blogging about a piece of it....

One of the chapters is on Thomas Ruffin, so I thought I'd post a note about an article that I forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review (thanks to Sally and Eric Muller's kindness) on Mr. Justice Ruffin. The article was part of Sally and Eric's conference last fall on The Perils of Public Homage. Chapel Hill residents may find this of particular interest because there's a dormitory on campus named (in part) after him. (It's Ruffin Hall and it's also named for his son.) Anyway, the paper is about two things. First, it's about Ruffin's jurisprudence; second, it's about what we make of the fact that there's a building named after him. The payoff on the later point is that I'm not at all sure the building was named for him because he was a proslavery jurist--in fact, I think that by the early twentieth century that piece of his jurisprudence may have been largely forgotten. And so now, somewhat oddly, the building serves as an occasion to talk about the era of slavery and what that meant to our state and our university.

Here's the abstract:

"Thomas Ruffin: Of Moral Philosophy and Monuments " returns to Justice Thomas Ruffin s opinions, particularly on slavery, to excavate his jurisprudence and to try to assess what Ruffin s legacy means for us today. It begins with an exploration of Ruffin s 1830 opinion in State v. Mann, where he self-consciously separated his feelings from his legal opinion to release a man who abused a slave from criminal liability. Anti-slavery activists frequently wrote about Mann, because of its brutal honesty about the harsh nature of slavery. After discussing Harriet Beecher Stowe s fictional account of Ruffin and Mann in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which further developed the theme of separation of law and morals, the paper turns to some of Ruffin s other opinions. It looks to slavery opinions including Heathcock v. Pennington (which released a renter of a slave from liability for his death in a coal mine) and Green v. Lane (which dealt with a trust to give quasi-freedom to slaves), as well as non-slavery cases like Scroggins v. Scroggins (which argued against granting judicial divorces because that would encourage more of them).

Ruffin s jurisprudence took the world as it was, or as he phrased it, looked to the nature of things. His judicial opinions the monuments he left to us illustrate a world of proslavery moral philosophy. That thought separated humanity from law and then decided cases based on precedent and considerations of utility to society. Ruffin was a great expositor of the system of slavery, as well as a great wielder of what Stowe called cold legal logic.

What should we make of this legacy today? Perhaps Ruffin aided the cause of antislavery through his honesty in State v. Mann. And, thus, perhaps we should honor him for that. Moreover, perhaps the honor he received in the early twentieth century (when a dormitory was named in part for him on the UNC campus) derives from his facility with legal reasoning outside of the slavery context. However, honoring him also runs the risk of honoring proslavery values. Conversely, removing his name from a building now runs the risk of concealing the prevalence of proslavery thought in the nineteenth century. That is, removing a name might facilitate a process of forgetting when universities should be trying to provide a proper context for viewing our past.

The paper's available on the social science research network.

Ruffin Field Trip: Part II

Here are two of Sally's other pictures from the Ruffin Field trip. At left is one of the slaves' houses from the historic Stagville, a plantation owned by the Beehan and Cameron families. About 900 enslaved people lived on the plantation around 1860. And below is the front of one of the houses. As I recall, there were four compartments--two on the entry floor and two on the second floor. Pretty sparse accommodations---no surprise there. And I think it's great that these structures have been preserved; they help convey a sense of what life was like. One of the things that surprised me (though it obviously shouldn't have) was how the houses are lined up in a row. It seemed very much like the industrial-era villages I've seen up north.

The Ruffin Field Trip

Last fall I had the pleasure of visiting Chapel Hill for a conference on Thomas Ruffin that Sally and Eric Muller put together. They also put together a terrific field trip, which included a trip to see Ruffin's office over in Hillsborough and then some slave quarters. Sally took a bunch of great pictures, but she didn't post them. I thought you'd enjoy Ruffin's office.

Remembering Thomas Ruffin

As a prologue to the symposium "The Perils of Public Homage: State v. Mann and Thomas Ruffin in History and Memory," which takes place tomorrow, Sanford Levinson, Eric Muller, and I were on WUNC's "The State of Things" today.

The symposium runs all day tomorrow.

To the courthouse--finally

After a painstaking restoration project that took an awfully long time, the Chowan County Courthouse reopened in October 2004. I said at the time that I wished I had been there for the reopening. Today, finally, I got there. They leave it open during the day. You can walk in and imagine what it was like to be in court there in the nineteenth century, or eighteenth (the building was built in 1767). Upstairs was a grand ballroom where President Monroe was lavishly entertained in 1819. They partied so hard then and on other occasions that by the latter 19th century it became prudent to add columns to the courtroom below.



This is the courtroom where, in the fall of 1829, John Mann was found guilty of assault upon a hired slave named Lydia, an opinion that Thomas Ruffin for the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned.

Thomas Ruffin: eyewitness to history

While searching in the Southern Historical Collection for something else, I came across a fascinating letter from Supreme Court Judge Thomas Ruffin to his family, an eyewitness account of the fire that destroyed the North Carolina Capitol building in 1831. So urgent was the occasion that he didn't date the letter with the date, but with the time of day (9 a.m.). Realizing that the building was going to be completely destroyed, happy that by valiant efforts the public records were removed before it was too late, he was most distressed about the certain loss of the marble statue of George Washington: "There is no man alive, who can replace it!"

The state of North Carolina had commissioned this impressive statue by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova in 1815. It was not replaced until 1970, when a duplicate was placed in the rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol. Meanwhile in 1857, a bronze statue of Washington, from a mold of the statue by Jean-Antione Houdon that stands in the rotunda of Virginia's capitol, was erected on Union Square. It was the first statue placed on the grounds of the North Carolina capitol.

Destination Chapel Hill

Laurie Paolicelli, for the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, is spearheading an effort to have Chapel Hill selected as one of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Distinctive Destinations for 2008. (Hillsborough is one for 2007.) She asked me to write a letter in support of the nomination. Here is what I wrote.

To the National Trust:

In November 1829, William Ruffin wrote from Chapel Hill to his father, Thomas Ruffin, who was soon to begin his distinguished career on the North Carolina Supreme Court, with a complaint about his new college town:

I think that the Trustees were imprudent in their choice of a site for the University. Instead of situating it in a town where there is good society or at least respectable with whom the students might have intercourse, they picked upon a spot at the time almost uninhabited and entirely destitute of persons with whom a gentleman ought to have intercourse. . . . The Trustees chose the spot where young men were to be trained up in the paths of science and morality, but left it open for vagabonds. If they wished a retired place aloof from the world, secluded from all intercourse with men—they should have permitted no one to settle on it. Whereas they have let all come who wished until finally half the villains in the state have congregated and fixed upon this place as one in which they can spend their time idly and at their ease.

Young Mr. Ruffin, no model student, should not be taken as a reliable witness. His father had pulled him out of a private college in Baltimore in favor of the state school that was both less expensive and closer to his watchful eye in Hillsborough. William’s sense of a clear difference between the town and the gown is accurate; but by the early 21st century, I believe most people have come to find the tension to be creative, healthy, and productive.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was “the first state university to open its doors.” I understand that folks down in Georgia had their charter earlier, but Chapel Hill brought more determination to the project. The physical campus, a beautiful space full of old buildings still in use surrounded by giant canopy trees, offers fascinating glimpses into a rich past, “rich” as in bountiful and “rich” as in fraught with the complexities that mark the entire American South. On McCorkle Place is an obelisk to the Rev. Joseph Caldwell, first president of the university. This marker was erected in 1904 to replace one considered not fine enough. The old marker was removed to the African American cemetery, where it marks the burial place of three slaves, including November Caldwell, who had belonged to Joseph Caldwell. Professor Tim McMillan offers a walking tour of the campus that reveals other interesting traces of the university’s racial history.

The African American cemetery and its white counterpart are next to the Center for Dramatic Art, which houses the Paul Green Theater, named for the first southern playwright to gain national attention. The original Playmakers Theater, which has just been renovated, is in an 1851 building that is a National Historic Landmark. A couple of blocks away, on beautiful Franklin Street with its large historic houses (within one of Chapel Hill’s three National Register districts), is the Horace Williams House, named for a UNC philosophy professor and home to the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill. Thomas Wolfe’s portrait hangs in the Dialectic Chambers in New West (actually an old building, recently renovated), and his shadow is everywhere.

When I came to Chapel Hill as a graduate student twenty years ago this fall, I was drawn to the university for its academic strengths, of course—but also to the town itself for its reputation as a beacon of light within North Carolina and the South. Thanks to the work of Frank Porter Graham, Howard Odum, and many other university figures, Chapel Hill has a secure reputation as a place where progressive ideas are born and progressive ideals are lived out. It has been my privilege to participate as a public official in the thoughtful evolution of this thriving and inclusive town. For me, the pleasures of living and working in Chapel Hill are inexhaustible. I am convinced that the history and character of Chapel Hill, as reflected in its built environment and the generosity of its citizens, are more than enough to make it a Distinctive Destination for 2008. I hope you will agree.

Death Penalty in NC: conflict of laws

Mark Kleinschmidt, head of the Fair Trial Initiative, which trains young lawyers to represent capital defendants (also my Council colleague), has the go-to blog for the amazing story unfolding within the courts and the halls of state about the North Carolina death penalty. For a capsule summary, this morning's N&O tells the story up to press time. As of this morning, the Council of State was about to meet, per Judge Stephens' order, to reconsider the protocol for executions. The N.C. Medical Board had recently announced an ethics policy saying that doctors cannot assist in an execution in any way, not even by monitoring medical devices attached to the defendant's body. To the state's argument before Judge Stephens that the equipment would be monitored by nurses and EMTs, he responded that that would constitute a change in the protocol. Citing a statute that neither side had raised, he ruled that the change in protocol had not been approved by the Council of State, as was required. (The monitoring equipment was required in response to a federal court opinion demanding more certainty in the administration of lethal drugs.) Effectively this opinion put all executions on hold, making North Carolina the eleventh state to halt lethal injections.

What did the Council of State do this morning? They affirmed a problematic protocol requiring a doctor's participation, in effect returning the issue to the courts. Mark has more:

During this morning's Council of State meeting, NC's state-wide elected officials approved on what appeared to be a 6-3 vote, a protocol for executions that requires the participation of a doctor. The Council's decision, in the words of Sec. of State Elaine Marshall just "shoves this back to the Medical Society." Two weeks ago, the NC Medical Board voted unanimously to declare it a violation of professional ethics to participate in executions.

Counsel for the Council and the Attorney General promise to take this decision back to Wake Co. Superior Ct. Judge Stephens and to work with the Medical Board.

Voting against the protocol were School Superintendent June Atkinson, Sec. of State Elaine Marshall and Insurance Commissioner Jim Long. A motion was unanimously approved -- made by Marshall and seconded by State Treasurer Richard Moore -- to refer this matter to the General Assembly for further consideration.

Marshall and Long both fought hard to kill approval. Marshall referenced the "off-label" use of the BIS monitor that was added just last year to the protocol. The BIS monitor monitors the vital signs of the death row inmate. Ostensibly to make sure the inmate is completely unconscious before the final poisons are injected. Manufacturers of the machine have protested the use of the monitor for this purpose and have made it clear in court papers that they would never have sold the machine to NC if they knew it would be used for this purpose.

Meanwhile as the N&O reports, yesterday the House Select Committee on Capital Punishment "gave up a chance to weigh in on the issue that has derailed three executions."

Nobody wants this issue.

Analogies are risky to be sure, so I wouldn't press this one farther than my intent. But in a conversation I had with Mark this morning it struck me that there are certain parallels between the death penalty and slavery. Mark pointed out that the conflict is between two arms of the state: the Council of State, which defines the protocol for executions, and the Board of Medical Examiners, whose members are appointed by the governor, which has its own standard of ethics. One is carrying out the will of the people, through the legislature, to put certain criminal defendants to death. The other is working out in concrete terms a body of ethical practices to ensure that a doctor "does no harm." These missions are bound to clash.

By the 1830s, slavery was a robust enough system to have its own body of case law. But these cases were riddled with contradictions, contradictions at the heart of which was the conflicted position of the slave body itself: is it a piece of property, or does the enslaved person have human rights that must be recognized in court? If the slave does have certain rights, how are those rights to be adjudicated differently from the rights of the free?

Just within the line of North Carolina cases involving quarrels between a white man and a slave, the results are all over the map. A white man may be guilty of a crime of battery against a slave that belongs to somebody else. (State v. Hale, 1823.) But a master may with impunity commit assault and battery upon his own slave, or even one he has leased, as a form of correction; his powers are "absolute," wrote Judge Thomas Ruffin. (State v. Mann, 1829.) But then, if a slave lashes out violently against a master in self-defense, held Judge William Gaston, the crime may be mitigated from murder to "felonious homicide," just as it would in the case of two white actors; the logic of Mann was "never intended to cover the entire relation between master and slave." (State v. Will, 1834.) And even though a master has virtually unlimited powers of physical "correction," he may be guilty of murder if he goes too far, Ruffin held. (State v. Hoover, 1839.) Further, the court will look sympathetically even upon a slave, reducing murder to manslaughter, if he kills a white man in a fit of passion brought on by that man's attack upon another slave, held Gaston, over Ruffin's vigorous dissent. (State v. Caesar, 1849.)

These difficult cases--even, at one level, the quarrel they represent between two judges who were great friends, Ruffin and Gaston--are, in James Oakes' analysis in Slavery and Freedom, "emblematic demonstrations of the problem of slave resistance in a liberal society." Placed, as they were from time to time, in the position of criminal defendants or victims, slaves forced the courts to address them as human beings. Indeed, as Oakes argues, although in one way the slavery opinions rallied the master class to solidify its defense of the institution, in another way the very slipperiness of the slave's legal position underscored the moral conundrum. Contradictory in outcome, the cases if anything tended to extend the rights of slaves as criminal defendants--intimations of liberty. Slavery was in some danger of breaking down under force of law, even before the war started.

When we judge the moral actions of those who came before us, such as slaveholders--when it seems so clear to us that what they participated in was wrong--we're sometimes led to wonder what moral failings future generations will accuse us of. It's my prediction, or at least a hope, that the death penalty will be one.

UPDATE 2/8: Richard Hart in the Independent Weekly on the "contradictions that simply can't be resolved."

UPDATE 2/9: NC nurses oppose requirement to participate in executions.

UPDATE 2/11: Today's N&O on the origin of the current, troublesome procedures for lethal injection. They were conceived by a Davidson College graduate, an Oklahoma legislator, who now regrets it. The rationale for this "three-drug cocktail," which starts with a sedative then moves to a paralytic and then a drug to stop the heart, has to do with the spectators: with us. It has to do with not wanting to watch a person die, with the shame of putting someone to death. The troublesome issue is that it's possible that the dose of sedative isn't enough for the person not to feel the paralysis or the heart drug. It is known that a person can be killed with a high dose of the sedative alone. But there's a problem. The person's body will react with physical movement. And it might take up to 30 minutes.

As Elizabeth Kuniholm, one of the lawyers for the defendants in the North Carolina case, said, "We don't want to feel like barbarians, and so we want it to look like a peaceful death.

It's about us.

Welcome to historic Hillsborough.

Props to Laurie Paolicelli, executive director of the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, for commissioning local writers to write about their home towns. Today in the Chapel Hill News we have Michael Malone's rhapsodic take (scroll down for the story) on Hillsborough and its "small-town charms."

This may be the first promotional article on Hillsborough in modern memory that mentions Judge Thomas Ruffin not only for his general high acclaim as an early 19th century jurist but also for his infamous decision in State v. Mann--the 1829 opinion in which he wrote, "The powers of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect."

Michael Malone ought to know: he and his wife, Maureen Quilligan, have in their own back yard the small, beautifully preserved office that Ruffin worked in; the Burnside property, where they live, next to St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, where he is buried, was the site of his home.

Has southern history turned a corner? Is it finally OK to talk candidly, even in the local newspaper, about our troubled, troubling past?

Tim Tyson thinks it has and is. Earlier this week he spoke on "The State of Things" about his upcoming course, through Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, called "The South in Black and White," as well as about his experiences lecturing on race around the state.

I sense a kind of new openness. There’s something going on out there, and I don’t exactly know, but I know that when we’re going to high schools and community colleges and churches these days we’re seeing a new willingness to talk about history in an open way and to tell the story a little differently. . . .

The fact that here in the South right now we’re seeing a new imagination about our prospects and this willingness to talk about race and history is not a surprise. If you look globally, everywhere where people are struggling for decent wages, for the dignity of human personality, for basic human rights, you will hear the vision of the black South that we’ll be studying in this course. This culture already echoes around the world, wherever people are standing up against what Dr. King called “the thingification of human beings.” The black South echoes for the ages. It’s a world historical culture that has come about in the South, of immense importance.

Next week I'm having lunch with Laurie Paolicelli, county commissioner Barry Jacobs, Afro-American Studies professor Tim McMillan, and others to talk about ways to highlight the history and experience of blacks in Chapel Hill and Orange County.

Not so set in stone

LeRae Umfleet, principal researcher for the report of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, was guest this morning on WNCU's "Legal Eagle" show with Irving Joyner. She noted that the public monuments scattered around the city in honor of the leaders of the Confederacy were erected in direct response to that event, the only overthrow of a duly elected government in our country's history.

George Davis, attorney general of the Confederacy, statue by Francis H. Packer, Wilmington, 1911

Indeed the memorials in Wilmington as well as in Raleigh, as Catherine Bishir has observed, played a crucial role in solidifying the history of the post-Reconstruction period. The lesson that 20th century schoolchildren would learn, punctuated by these towering monuments, was that a fearful threat of "Negro domination" had been put down--with violence to be sure, and that was unfortunate--so that white rule could be restored and the proper order of things reinstated. “With competing visions of the state’s past, present, and future all but silenced in official discourse, [North Carolina’s] leaders shared a powerful sense that both in politics and in the culture at large, matters had been returned to their correct alignment,” Bishir writes in Fitz Brundage's collection Where These Memories Grow. The state’s history was reinterpreted as a tapestry of “old family heritage, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and military and political heroism,” all with an aim toward a “rebirth of southern progress and leadership in the nation.”

Thomas Ruffin, statue by Francis H. Packer, Raleigh (Court of Appeals Building), 1915

Judge Thomas Ruffin's statue is one of several monuments in Raleigh that came out of this historical moment of renewed pride and reflection. In dedicating the statue, J. Crawfurd Biggs, president of the North Carolina Bar Association, spoke for the state's ruling class when he emphasized the importance of placing the likenesses of great historical figures on public display:

We have not exerted ourselves to stimulate a healthy State pride, by preserving in marble and bronze the records of the past, by erecting statues and suitable memorials to commemorate the name and fame of the great men whose services have enriched and glorified the traditions of our Commonwealth. It is from the experience of the past that we draw inspiration for the future, and any act which emblazons in imperishable form the great deeds of our ancestors should be regarded with favor.

Across the country in this period, "Public monuments helped to celebrate and cement [a] progressive narrative of national history," writes Kirk Savage--a narrative that "instill[ed] a sense of historical closure. Memorials to heroes and events were not meant to revive old struggles and debates but to put them to rest—to show how great men and their deeds had made the nation better and stronger. Commemoration was a process of condensing the moral lessons of history and fixing them in place for all time; this required that the object of commemoration be understood as a completed stage of history, safely nestled in a sealed-off past."

But"[t]his logic of commemoration drastically shriveled history," Savage continues. "Women, nonwhites, laborers, and others who did not advance the master narrative of progress defined by a white male elite had little place in the commemorative scheme, except perhaps as the occasional foil by which heroism could be better displayed. This kind of commemoration sought to purify the past of any continuing conflict that might disturb the carefully crafted national narrative."

The success of just such "purification" of the past is what makes the Wilmington report so important for North Carolinians. Close to 500 pages in hard copy, it documents in fact after stubborn fact how "[e]very facet of African American life was affected by the events of 1898" (248). With other recent efforts to come to terms with Reconstruction--Thomas C. Holt's 2004 speech at UNC comes to mind--the work of LeRae Umfleet and the Wilmington Race Riot Commission un-fixes the past in productive ways. For as Savage puts it, "The history of monuments themselves is no more closed than the history they commemorate."

Courting history

Wish I'd been in Edenton last week for the reopening of the historic Chowan County Courthouse. It would have been fascinating, if not really historically accurate, to see the N.C. Supreme Court in session there. Built in 1767 when Edenton was an important Revolutionary-era town, this was a busy local court for a couple hundred years.

The oldest Court House in North Carolina, [it] is an architectural gem of national reputation. A sketch of its life reads like a panoramic review of the life of North Carolina: the hardships of the early colony, the struggles of revolution, civil war and reconstruction; all finally unfolding into the commonwealth that is the Old North State of today. Through six conflicts the call to arms has resounded within its walls; it can recall the inauguration of every President of the United States; Governors from the time of Josiah Martin have spoken from its rostrum; Princes and Presidents have danced on its floors and the most illustrious lawyers of the State have pleaded their causes before its bar.

It was here in 1829 that a jury found a poor white man named John Mann guilty of assault for shooting a rented slave as she ran off from being whipped by him, a decision overturned by Thomas Ruffin and immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel Dred and in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin--and still widely studied.

This courthouse loomed large in the life of Harriet Jacobs, who escaped Edenton to become "a quiet revolutionary" on her own terms.

Surprisingly, but fittingly, a picture of the Chowan County Courthouse is featured in a recent essay by Wendell Berry on the subject of land use and the environment. It's an example of "old buildings [that] look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors"--an example we can learn from.