Slave law:  the Mann rule moderated

State v. Negro Will – North Carolina, 1834 (1 Dev. & Bat. 121); State v. Caesar – North Carolina, 1849 (9 Iredell 391)

• The debate whether any limits could be put on a master’s right to punish his slaves did not end with Justice Ruffin’s pronouncement in State v Mann (§ __) that there should be no limits on a master’s right to punish his slaves.  In subsequent years, Ruffin’s colleagues carved out exceptions.  In Negro Will they held that a slave, like whites, could raise self-defense as an excuse for killing an overseer who chased and shot at him.  In Caesar, the court went a step further and held that a slave who, provoked by a master’s severe beating of his friend, attacked and killed the master, was liable only for manslaughter.  Even in the post-Nat Turner era, Justices Frederick Nash and Richmond Pearson rejected Ruffin’s argument that murder must be the charge in order to deter other slave attacks.

“The prisoner is a human being, degraded indeed by slavery, but yet having ‘organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,’ like our own.  “Does that benignant principle of the law, by which allowance is made for the infirmity of our nature … apply to a slave?? Or is he commanded, under pain of death, not to yield to these feelings and impulses of human nature, under any circumstances?  I think the principle does apply, and am not willing [to] exclud[e] it from the case of slaves.” – Chief Justice Richmond Pearson, in Caesar

Slave law:  Problems of manumission by will

Thompson v. Newlin – North Carolina, 1844 (3 Ired. Eq. 338); Thompson v. Newlin – North Carolina, 1851 (8 Ired. Eq. 32); Jincey v. Winfield’s Administrator – Virginia, 1853 (9 Gratt. 708)

• Despite increased legal restrictions on manumission after 1800, Quakers and other southern opponents of slavery tried to keep manumission alive.  In the 1830s and 1840s, southern Quakers tried the stratagem of bequeathing their slaves to heirs on condition that the slaves be “held for their own benefit and advantage” – in other words, that they be free in all but name.  In Newlin, Justice Ruffin held that such wills could not be enforced unless they required the slaves to leave North Carolina as required by state law. 

• Newlin, the heir, then took his slaves to Ohio and freed them outright.  Other heirs challenged his right to do so but when the case came back to North Carolina’s supreme court, Ruffin, with uncharacteristic liberalism, held that as long as the slaves stayed out of North Carolina, Newlin could free them outright if he wished.   In Jincey, Virginia’s supreme court also opted to take a relaxed rather than a strict attitude toward emancipation by will.  It held that slaves so emancipated must remain slaves long enough to ensure that all of their late master’s debts were paid, but after that they could demand their freedom at any time.