In 1829, a jury of twelve white men convicted John Mann of Chowan County, N.C., of the battery of a slave, a woman named Lydia, hired out to him by her owner. Such a verdict was hardly unprecedented in the antebellum South. But it fell to Judge Thomas Ruffin, then an associate justice of the state’s supreme court, to reluctantly overturn the jury’s verdict — on grounds that would make the case famous nationwide: Because the end of slavery, Ruffin wrote, “is the profit of the master, his security and the public safety . . . the power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” It was a fundamentally unjust arrangement, Ruffin believed, but dismantling it was not within the purview of a judge bound by the people’s duly enacted law. Ruffin took no pleasure in his own decision:

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 the state of slavery. [Master and slave] cannot be disunited [by the court], without abrogating at once the rights of the master, and absolving the slave from his subjection.

Source: Ian Tuttle, http://www.nationalreview.com