Last week, Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Carl R. Fox requested the removal of the portrait of former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin from the courtroom in the historic Orange County Courthouse “because of his racist past and his participation in slave trading and slave ownership.” The county manager’s office has complied with his request.

A Hillsborough attorney, Orange County farmer, and trustee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ruffin joined the Supreme Court in 1829, serving as chief justice from 1833 to 1852. The portrait is a copy of one commissioned by an honor society at UNC. It had hung in the courtroom since a renovation in 1993.

Ruffin was nationally recognized during his lifetime for his keen judicial mind. Little mentioned after his death, however, was an opinion in recent years deemed to be among the most shocking in the entire body of slavery law. State v. Mann (1829), as Judge Fox wrote in a statement, “rivals the Dred Scott decision in its horror and inhumanity.”

State v. Mann gave enslavers virtually unlimited powers of discipline. In overturning a Chowan County’s verdict of assault against a man who had shot a young enslaved African American woman in the back as she fled from his chastisement, Ruffin wrote: “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” There was no legal or statutory precedent to justify the opinion. Its language was broadly circulated, licensing extreme physical abuse.

As a businessman, Ruffin trafficked in human lives: he secretly partnered with a South Carolina man in a speculative slave trading business. His personal life, too, indicates little respect for enslaved people: he once took a cane to an enslaved woman who had come on to his property without permission.

These facts are among those discovered in original research conducted by UNC law professor Eric Muller and Commissioner Sally Greene.