A recent article offers an interesting view into what people in the pre-Civil War south did with extraordinary wealth, how they tried to keep property in their families, and how men were concerned about that wealth passing outside the family to son-in-laws.
Stephen Duane Davis, II, a law clerk with the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Alabama and Alfred L. Brophy, professor of law, University of North Carolina, studied wills filed in Greene County, Alabama, between 1813 and 1845. They looked at how people used “sophisticated trust mechanisms for both managing property and keeping it within their families.” They suggest that trusts were much like other ‘technologies’ used to create wealth and improve society. Finally, the data shows “the salience of enslaved human property, often managed through trusts after their owners died and also frequently divided between family members, to the maintenance of family wealth.”
Brophy explained in another article that he and Davis were interested in the demographics of those who had wills (gender, marital status, and wealth). They also had questions about how people distributed property and how they used trusts to manage property. They had a special interest in how probate worked with passing slaves to surviving family. They also wanted to look at “the differences between patterns of testation based on gender of the decedent; the use of trusts to maintain property within the family; the changes over time and the ways that wills and trusts were part of the machinery of modernization.”
Tables are posted separately here.
An interesting read.
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