Key local figure
Ruffin entered the bar at Hillsborough in 1808 and served on the University of North Carolina's Board of Trustees from 1813 to 1831 and from 1842 to 1868. On the state supreme court he wrote State v. Mann, holding that the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.
Source: UNC, Names in Brick and Stone: Ruffin Residence Hall
1787–1870 as the Library of Congress records it · On the Friends’ Local Authors roster → · Library of Congress authority record ↗
13 indexed works are connected with this person, and the index includes 3 works by Thomas Ruffin.
Works in the index that concern this person directly, or were written by them. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it; background reading with wider context sits further down.
Ayr Mount, the brick manor house on Saint Mary's Road in Hillsborough, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey after 1933. The set holds nine photographs, twenty measured drawings, six data pages and a caption page. Samuel S. and Anne Kirkland and Thomas Ruffin are named with the house, and North Carolina State University students prepared drawings.
Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin's law office, a small wooden building at Burnside in Cameron Park, Hillsborough. Historic American Buildings Survey documentation compiled after 1933: one photograph, four data pages and a caption page. Rebecca B. Wall, Paul Carrington Cameron and James Hogg are also named with the building.
St. Matthew's Episcopal Church on St. Mary's Road in Hillsborough, documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey after 1933: five photographs, three data pages and a caption page. Names linked to the brick church include John Berry, Thomas Ruffin, Bishop John Stark Ravenscroft, Moses Ashley Curtis, Tiffany and Company and the Cameron, Hill and Graham families.
Sally Greene on how Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin has been remembered, from his statue at the North Carolina Court of Appeals to his rulings on slavery.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OpenAlex record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Timothy C. Meyer compares the slavery rulings of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin and Justice William Gaston on the North Carolina Supreme Court, 1828 to 1858.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OpenAlex record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Eric L. Muller on how Thomas Ruffin's slavery opinions, State v. Mann among them, should be weighed now, and on the hindsight defense of honoring him.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OpenAlex record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Patrick S. Brady reconsiders the Ruffin court's decisions on slavery, race and criminal law in antebellum North Carolina.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OpenAlex record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Julius Yanuck on Thomas Ruffin and the slave law of North Carolina, in the Journal of Southern History.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OpenAlex record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Photographs gathered by Mary Claire Engstrom (1906-1997), dated from the 1930s to 1979 with most falling between the 1950s and 1976, about 2,140 items in 4.4 linear feet in UNC's North Carolina Collection. Subjects include historic buildings in Hillsborough and Orange County, the Alexander Dixon House, the Nash Hooper Graham House, Bingham School, Nash and Kollock School, the Hillsboro' Military Academy, Carrboro views, and the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Diaries and papers of John Hill Wheeler of Hertford County, historian, legislator, state treasurer from 1843 to 1845 and minister to Nicaragua from 1854 to 1857. The diaries, a broken run from 1854 to 1882, follow his social and political life in Washington, D.C. University commencements at Chapel Hill and his work on North Carolina history also come up. State Archives of North Carolina, MfP.51.
Why this is here: Their name appears in the record.
David L. Swain, 1801 to 1868, served as governor of North Carolina and then as president of the university at Chapel Hill. His papers span 1807 to 1877 with the bulk from 1833 to 1868. Subjects include Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elisha Mitchell, W. W. Holden and Thomas Ruffin, and cover state politics, railroads, and records of enslaved people. Microfilm reels were made in 1949 and 1974.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Ruffin, Thomas, 1787-1870.
Papers of the Cain and Hinton families, 1801 to 1969, centered on Hardscrabble, the farm in eastern Orange County, now Durham County, that Dr. James Frederick Cain (1828 to 1904) inherited about 1857 on land his family had held since 1779. Diaries, scrapbooks, recipes, poems and photographs sit alongside papers on women's clubs, hereditary societies and suffrage, with ties to Stagville.
Why this is here: Their name appears in the record.
Papers of Archibald D. Murphey, the Orange County lawyer, state senator, superior court judge and historian, 1797 to 1852. Many of the letters are ones William Henry Hoyt gathered for his two-volume edition of Murphey's papers, published in Raleigh in 1914. Topics include court cases, internal improvements, the western lands, the university trustees, and friends in Louisiana and the Mississippi Territory in 1811 and 1812. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.12.
Why this is here: Their name appears in the record.
Family papers of Frederick Nash, 1757 to 1864. Nash was an Orange County legislator and judge who sat on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1844 and served as chief justice from 1852 to 1858. The letters, many undated, deal with family matters, an 1822 case in Wilkes County Superior Court and the lack of organized religion in Hillsborough. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.72.
Why this is here: Their name appears in the record.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this person. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
Letters and papers of Thomas Ruffin (1787 to 1870), chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, collected and edited by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton in four volumes for the North Carolina Historical Commission, Raleigh, 1918 to 1920. Ruffin practiced law in Hillsborough and died there. The first volume opens with William A. Graham's 1871 memorial oration on his life and character, and the set includes a portrait and a genealogical table.
Dated events connected with this person: sixteen of 28, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 28 dated events in the chronology →
Ruffin finished his legal studies under Archibald D. Murphey in Rockingham County and qualified to practice law in 1808. He moved to Hillsborough on June 9, 1809, and built his practice there; William A. Graham later read law with him.
Out of affection for his son-in-law Thomas Ruffin and his daughter Anne, William Kirkland of Ayr Mount conveyed to Ruffin a woman named Juley, her two children, John and an infant, and a young girl, all of them already in the Ruffins' household. The deed was proved at the Orange County court that August.
People: William Kirkland · Thomas Ruffin · Anne Kirkland Ruffin
Subject: Ayr Mount
Ruffin served on the university's Board of Trustees from 1813 to 1831 and again from 1842 to 1868. The residence hall completed in 1922 was named for him and for his son Thomas Ruffin Jr.
A one-room frame law office with a rubble stone chimney was built for Thomas Ruffin, later chief justice of North Carolina, near his house on what became the Burnside lawn. It still stands on its original site.
Subject: Burnside
Two students, drunk from the village grog shop and armed with a club and a pistol, went out after members of the faculty and assaulted two of them. The trustees living in Orange County were called to sit with the faculty, and the two were expelled.
People: Elisha Mitchell · Duncan Cameron · Thomas Ruffin · James Webb
After decades without a resident minister, Hillsborough's Episcopalians organized a parish again and founded the present St. Matthew's on Thomas Ruffin's gift of land, with William Mercer Green as first rector.
People: William Mercer Green · Thomas Ruffin · Francis L. (Francis Lister) Hawks · William Norwood
Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
Thomas Ruffin of Hillsborough, newly seated on the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote the opinion in State v. Mann, overturning the conviction of John Mann of Edenton for shooting Lydia, an enslaved woman he had hired, as she fled a whipping. Ruffin held that a master's power must be absolute, and abolitionists later cited the ruling widely.
People: Thomas Ruffin · Lydia
With debts of about $37,500 and only some 82 paying students, a special meeting of trustees at Chapel Hill on June 21, 1830 called the whole board to Raleigh on July 19. There a committee under James Iredell reported on the finances, and the board adopted a memorial drawn by Thomas Ruffin asking the General Assembly for relief.
People: Joseph Caldwell · Willie P. Mangum · Thomas Ruffin · William Gaston
Ten men were put forward at meetings around the county, and the voters chose two physicians, William Montgomery and James S. Smith. Each sided with the majority that abolished borough seats, which cost Hillsborough its own member in the House of Commons.
People: Thomas Ruffin · Frederick Nash
Paul Cameron built the town house he named Burnside on South Cameron Street, on the stone foundation of his father-in-law Thomas Ruffin's earlier house. Enslaved workers from Cameron's Fairntosh plantation built it under his master carpenter Jack, and John Berry laid the brick.
People: John Berry · Thomas Ruffin
Subject: Burnside
Thomas Ruffin's deed of April 10, 1854 formally conveyed 1 1/3 acres to St. Matthew's Church, land he had given verbally around 1820. The tract was later enlarged for the church, parish house and walled cemetery.
Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
The house on East Orange Street, built about 1821 and enlarged in the 1830s, was sold to Thomas Ruffin in 1865. He named it Little Hawfields. The Town of Hillsborough acquired the property in 1972 and made it the Town Hall.
Two bricks in a small outbuilding near the Burnside stable in Hillsborough carry the hand-cut inscription 'Dec 5, '65', found during the building's restoration after 2003. The owners and descendants connect it to Jesse Ruffin, a coachman once enslaved by Thomas Ruffin. According to family tradition he cut the date to mark the day after the General Assembly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally ended slavery.
People: Thomas Ruffin
Subject: Burnside
Thomas Ruffin bought lots 177, 178, 179, 204, 205 and 206, which adjoined the house he had acquired the year before, from Pride Jones.
People: Pride Jones
In 1877 a band of four broke into six houses in and near Chapel Hill and wounded the widow Margaret Hendon with an axe blade while trying to rob her. Albert Atwater, a Black man held for a lesser offense, confessed and named two white men and a Black man, who were convicted in Orange Superior Court and hanged on April 16, 1878 after Governor Jarvis refused clemency.
People: William P. (William Peter) Mallett · Thomas Ruffin · Thomas Jordan Jarvis
The Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to rename the street for Lydia, the enslaved woman shot by John Mann in the case Thomas Ruffin decided. All twelve households on the street had petitioned for a new name and had first proposed Hope Lane; Commissioner Mark Bell suggested using Lydia's name, and Commissioner Kathleen Ferguson made the motion to approve.
People: Thomas Ruffin
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
People named in the same dated entries as Thomas Ruffin, those sharing the most entries first. Each line links one of the shared entries in the chronology, where its source is cited. A shared entry shows these people in the same event, not how well they knew each other.
The index lists works with an Orange County connection. To find everything else about Thomas Ruffin, search these catalogs.
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Picture: Thomas Ruffin, 1897. Public domain. Google Books - William Joseph Peele (1897) Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, Category:New York: The North Carolina Publishing Society, pp. p.283; via Wikimedia Commons
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