The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect. — Justice Thomas Ruffin, North Carolina Supreme Court, 1829
When Hard Histories at Hopkins was featured in this month's issue of Baltimore Magazine, senior editor Ron Cassie returned to a perennial question: What do we know about the enslaved people held in the household of Johns Hopkins in 1840 and 1850?
Today, the answer remains unchanged: very little. Census returns are snapshot sketches that do not include the names or other life details about enslaved people. Mr. Hopkins's personal and business records were not preserved, limiting what we know about his financial transactions and personal views. Much of the business of slavery in the U.S. was a matter of private law — largely contracts — that rarely left traces in the public record. A scouring of the extant public record has not discovered any additional traces of who the one man noted in 1840 and the four men noted in 1850 were to Mr. Hopkins, or he to them. Absent new evidence, what we can know about the enslaved men in Mr. Hopkins's household is limited.
Ron Cassie raised one theory worth returning to: The enslaved people in Mr. Hopkins's household "likely "belonged” to someone else … or Hopkins or someone in his family held them under a temporary arrangement.” This view suggests that, while enslaved people were part of Mr. Hopkins's household, he did not own them in fee simple — or outright. Instead, Mr. Hopkins borrowed, rented, or shared, was bequeathed, gifted, or loaned the people in his household and their labor. These relationships, under this theory, were temporary, delimited by time and other terms bargained for between Mr. Hopkins and another, an unknown deed holder in human beings.
Is this a distinction with a difference? Not very much of one in antebellum America. The clearest statement on this question comes from the 1829 case of State v. Mann, decided by the North Carolina Supreme Court. John Mann rented an enslaved woman, Lydia, and later shot her in the back when he tried to escape from his home. Justice Thomas Ruffin ruled that the power of Mann was equivalent to that of the person who owned Lydia by deed. Lydia survived and still, Ruffin explained, Mann was not guilty of battery. His authority was unlimited, infamously declaring, “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” Mann, renting but not owning Lydia, committed no crime and was within his rights when he shot her.3
Today, State v. Mann sounds a cautionary note for researchers looking to understand the dynamics of a household such at that of Mr. Hopkins. His power over the four or five men there was, in Justice Ruffin's view, absolute. "Masters,” in Ruffin's parlance — be they deed holders or casual renters — exercised equal dominion over the lives and labors of enslaved people. The law of contract might bar a temporary custodian from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise possessing the full rights of a deed holder. But in the lives of the enslaved people in his home, Mr. Hopkins's authority extended to the outer limits of lives and their deaths. A enslaved person's obedience was "the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body,” as Ruffin put it.
Justice Ruffin's ruling — and the callous logic that undergirded it — has not withstood the test of time. Though his position held legal sway in the decades before the Civil War and slavery's abolition, today State v. Mann has earned Ruffin an unequivocal rebuke. After its own reckoning with Justice Ruffin and his decision, in December 2020 the North Carolina Supreme Court became the latest state court to remove Ruffin's portrait from its walls.
Next post, we'll look at how the research of historian Sally Greene and then a hard history approach led the state of North Carolina to publicly retell the story of State v. Mann, now from the perspective of Lydia rather than that of John Mann or Thomas Ruffin. It is a story of reckoning and repair.
— MSJ.
The mythology of Hopkins as an abolitionist was created to permit ongoing favorable treatment for the private institutions (including funding from the state when it was in dire straits). The Baltimore Magazine article continues that long tradition that delegitimizes the collective memory of residents whose human rights who were first violated by the Hopkins family (for centuries) and the institutions that bear his name (ongoing). To even suggest that Hopkins' inclusion on the 1850 census was "discovered" by Papenfuse is laughable on its face. "Historians" who before 2020 chose to overlook the slave schedules, (and those who continue to stretch the significance of "slave owner") willingly risk their academic integrity in favor of maintaining the myth. I say this not just because the article that I wrote for the same magazine was killed at the last minute allegedly solely based on my world view shaped by my race and experiences. Instead, the magazine unapologetically published (but not unsurprising) an article that fully embraces a Hopkins-centered world view -- as if whiteness is not a world view to be challenged. The privilege cannot be undone if it's never acknowledged.
The public record has yielded several traces of the one enslaved man in Hopkins’ 1840 household. His name was George (probably Johnson), he was born in Winchester, VA, and he was 18 in 1840. His owners were Samuel and Lavinia Hopkins. Ed Papenfuse and I have uncovered documents in VA and MD that confirm these facts. You can read about them, and the life of Sam Hopkins, Jr., here: https://www.thehouseofhopkins.com/essays/21-samuel-hopkins-jr