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    Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue
    Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue
    Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue
    Ebook53 pages33 minutes

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

    By Sally Greene

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    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."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUNC Center for the Study of the American South
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9780807882801
    Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History: An article from Southern Cultures 17:3, The Memory Issue
    Author

    Sally Greene

    Sally Greene is an independent scholar whose interests include the law, literature, and history of the American South. Her essays have appeared in the Southern Quarterly, the Mississippi Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the North Carolina Law Review. She is Associate Director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.

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      Book preview

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

      ESSAY

      Judge Thomas Ruffin and the Shadows of Southern History

      by Sally Greene

      Thomas Ruffin’s statue, of heroic scale on a pedestal of polished white marble, makes a commanding presence, even from the alcove of the court building. Dressed in swallow- tail coat and cravat, Ruffin stands with an air of power and of elevation. His squarely frontal yet unguarded position invokes a classical style of ideal masculinity that was refined in the eighteenth century. Photograph courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

      A visitor to the North Carolina Court of Appeals could be forgiven for failing to notice Judge Thomas Ruffin’s statue in an alcove in the building’s foyer. Obstructed by a latter-day handicap access ramp, the larger-than-life bronze figure nevertheless stolidly presides. From its opening in 1914 until 1940, this building was the home of the North Carolina Supreme Court, of which Ruffin was chief justice from 1833 to 1852. After 1940, when the Supreme Court moved next door to a building constructed by the Works Progress Administration, the building became known as the Library Building; in 1967, it became home to the newly established Court of Appeals.¹

      Ruffin’s statue was created by Francis H. Packer, a New York artist of some renown who had studied with Saint-Gaudens. One of his statues already graced Union Square, as the lawn of the capitol is called. It depicts Worth Bagley, son of prominent North Carolinians and the first American officer killed in the Spanish-American War. As historian Gaines Foster has persuasively written, this war served as a powerful antidote to the Civil War, rallying the reunified nation to a common cause. Bagley’s death, Catherine Bishir notes, was hailed in the national press as sealing the ‘covenant of brotherhood between north and south.’ The monument’s inscription, First Fallen, 1898, echoed that of the nearby Confederate monument, FIRST AT BETHEL, LAST AT APPOMATTOX. The threads of American history thus came together in these monuments, as well as others near the capitol, to be joined, only a few years later, by the statue of Ruffin, the state’s most distinguished jurist.²

      The appearance of all of these monuments in Raleigh around the turn of the century reflected a local response to a sweeping national phenomenon. [T]he decades between 1870 and 1910 comprised the most notable period in all of American history for erecting monuments in honor of mighty warriors, groups of unsung heroes, and great deeds, writes Michael Kammen in The Mystic Chords of Memory. The movement carried with it a kind of ‘contagion’ that spilled from Civil War saints to battles and martyrs of other wars. Although the poverty of the South after the war meant that the monuments there were slow in coming, the political elite throughout

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