State v. Mann has endured as perhaps the most important case in the entire body of American jurisprudence involving slavery. Of all the cases dealing with slaves and their masters, it is unrivaled for the stark, brutal coldness with which the master’s authority is articulated. Writing for the North Carolina Supreme Court, Judge Thomas Ruffi n gave masters (including those who merely hired the slaves of others) virtually unbridled physical dominion over their slaves. Ironically, the opinion’s widest circulation emerged among abolitionists, who pointed to its rhetoric as confi rmation of slavery’s basic immorality. A body of criticism that reached a high note with Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1850s was embraced, more than a century later, by revisionist legal historians for whom State v. Mann became emblematic of all that was wrong with the antebellum South.