Does any reader still doubt whether an owner thus has uncontrolled authority over the body of his female slave? Let him read the following extract from an opinion of the Supreme Court of the State of North Carolina,--the Old North State, whence Bishop Ives has long since ceased to weep over the "imaginary sufferings" of the slaves! To avoid a chastisement, a female slave ran off, and, on her refusal to stop when called, was shot at and wounded. Judge Ruffin, in delivering the opinion of the court (State _vs._ Mann, 2 Dev. Rep. 263), says:--
"The inquiry here is, whether a cruel and unreasonable battery on a slave by the hirer is indictable?... In criminal proceedings, and, indeed, in reference to all other persons but the general owner, the hirer and possessor of a slave, in relation to both rights and duties, is, for the time being, the owner....
"With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person, and in his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without capacity to make any thing his own, and to toil that others may reap the fruits.
"What moral considerations shall be addressed to such a being to convince him what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can never be true, that he is thus to labor upon a principle of natural duty, or for the sake of his own personal happiness? Such services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in explicit obedience to that of another. _Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body._ There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And, as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But, in the actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to slavery."[O]
Judge Ruffin had not enjoyed the benefit of the instruction imparted some years later by Bishops Ives and Freeman. If he had, he would not thus have followed the dictate of a "desperately wicked" heart, and have repudiated the discipline of slavery as morally wrong!