Source: Judge Thomas Ruffin, *State v. Mann*, North Carolina Supreme Court, 1829.
"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... But it is inherent in the relation of master and slave. That relation indeed must be established, to make the slave's labor of any value... The end is the profit of the master, his security and the public safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits."
The legal arguments presented in the excerpt most directly reflect which of the following aspects of Southern society in the first half of the nineteenth century?
- AA transition in the Southern agricultural labor force from temporary indentured contracts to permanent, hereditary chattel slavery.
- The development of legal and social systems designed to protect the slaveholding elite's authority and maintain the racial hierarchy.Cevap
- CThe decline of Southern integration into national and international markets as planters focused on self-sufficient local economies.
- DThe influence of New England Puritan legal traditions that emphasized communal covenant responsibility over individual property rights.