¹ English common law was adopted by all of the states after the Revolution as the basis of the American legal system. As new territories were settled, with the exception of Louisiana, so too did the tenets of common law become established throughout Anglo-America. (Marlene Stein Wortman, Women in American Law, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the New Deal [New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985], p. 14.)
² David M. Walker, The Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 668.
³ Marylynn Salmon, Carole Shammas, and Michel Dahlin, Inheritance in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), p. 23-24.
⁴ Salmon, Inheritance in America, pp. 28-29.
⁵ A jure uxoris estate entitled the husband to the possession, use, income and usufruct of his wife's property for the life of them both which was, therefore, liable for his debts. (Peggy A. Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters: The Legal foundations of Female Emancipation [Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1980], p. 20)
⁶ Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters, p. 21
⁷ Equity is a complimentary system of jurisprudence, dispensed by a judge, that provides individual remedies where there is either no common law precedent or where a particular situation results in injustice. (Marlene Stein Wortman, Women in American Law, Vol. I: From Colonial Times to the New Deal [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985], p.5.) By the nineteenth century, this by-pass of the laws through equity became a high art form. Equitable jurisdiction usually involved the control of trusts and separate properties, thereby recognizing the validity of legal actions taken upon the woman's behalf by her estate's guardians. (Walker, Oxford Companion to Law, p. 426.)
⁸ Salmon, Inheritance in America, p. 77-78.
⁹ Between 1835 and 1849, several states including Mississippi, Maryland, Arkansas, Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, Iowa, New York, and Pennsylvania enacted legislation providing for separate estates for married women. (Richard Chused, "Married Women's Property Law: 1800-1850" Georgetown Law Journal 71 [1983], p. 1410)
¹⁰ Elizabeth Gaspar Brown, "Husband and Wife: Memorandum on the Mississippi Women's Law of 1839," Michigan Law Review 42 (1944), p. 1113.
¹¹ Richard H. Chused, "Married Women's Property Law: 1800-1850," Georgetown Law Journal 71 (1983), p. 1398.
¹² Many of the works cited in this paper such as, Marylynn Salmon, et. al.'s research in Inheritance in America, Peggy Rabkin's book, Fathers to Daughters, and Richard Chused's 1983 article in the Georgetown Law Journal, are only an example of nineteenth-century legal historians' bias towards the urban north-east. Few historians even project, let alone acknowledge that the Mississippi statutes of the 1830s might have had any effect on the later reforms enacted by other states except in wording, and perhaps, precedent. Despite this dearth of historical attention, the Mississippi married women's property acts significantly affected the lives of Mississippi women in the decades before the civil war and became the foundation of later reforms.
¹³ The Mississippi Constitution of 1868 stated, "The rights of married women shall be protected by law in property owned previous to marriage; and also in all property acquired in good faith by purchase, devise, or bequest, after marriage; Provided That nothing herein contained shall be so construed as to protect said property from being applied to the payment of their lawful debts. (Article I, Section 16, in Thorpe). The Revised Code of 1871 further defines separate property by making a wife's wages part of her separate estate. Any rents, issues, profits, products, and income from her real or personal estate were hers as well. (Article V, Section 1778, The Revised Code of the Statute Laws of the State of Mississippi, [Jackson: Alcorn & Fisher, State Printers , p. 376.]) (Suzanne D. Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," The Journal of Southern History XLIII [May 1977] 2, p. 214.)
¹⁴ The hazards of dying intestate are exemplified by the problems faced by Cynthia Montgomery Obier Taylor's heirs after her 1853 death. She had inherited a portion of her father Hugh Montgomery's $3150.12 estate in 1846 when she was twenty-nine and married to her first husband John Obier. Both Montgomery and Obier owned lands in the far northeast part of Amite County that would eventually become part of Lincoln County. Obier died in the late 1840s and Cynthia remarried to Thomas Taylor in January 1850 when she was thirty-three and he twenty-two years old. At the time of her death three years later, she and Taylor had a daughter Martha. Cynthia also had a 16-year-old daughter named Aletha from her first marriage to Obier. The inventory of Cynthia Taylor's estate, dated May 1854, consisted mostly of farm implements, small livestock, and produce. Also included are two bedsteads, three mattresses and furniture, eight chairs, crockery, glassware, and tableware. Her entire estate, including the value of three slaves, was estimated at $1586.25 -- not an inconsiderable amount. (Amite County Archive File 188.)
The lack of a will created a legal problem for the second husband. After Cynthia's death in 1853, Thomas Taylor petitioned the court in favor of his and Cynthia's young daughter, Martha. (Amite County Archive File 188.) Apparently Thomas Taylor wanted to insure that his child received her share of her mother's estate. Chattel slave property law declared that had some of the slaves originally belonged to Obier, that portion of the estate would only go to the child of that union, Aletha Obier. (Section Four, Act for the Protection and Preservation of the Rights of Married Women, 1839. See Appendix for text.) At the time of Taylor's petition, Aletha already had a guardian, appointed at the time of her father's death, and presumably would have inherited a portion of her motherÕs estate in addition to what she might have received from her father. Whether Cynthia's existing estate was fully or only partially ObierÕs, in May 1854, a year and a half after the recording of the inventory, Martha Taylor was granted one part, presumably a third, of her motherÕs estate. Cynthia Taylor's movable property, including the slaves she owned and the rest of her goods, was sold by Taylor after her death for $1694. (Amite County Archive File 188.) The reasons for this liquidation are unclear. There may have been financial crisis on the part of Taylor or families could not decide an equitable division of labor and goods. Because of the petition the court may have ordered disposal of the estate for an even distribution by law to all three parties. What is important was that by having been married more than once, Cynthia Taylor had created a situation of conflict regarding the disposal of her property. Had she been willing, able, aware, or interested in avoiding such problems -- which appeared to have the effect of disposing from her family personal goods that might have later had sentimental value to either of her daughters, or the human value of the slaves that were sold -- the new property law would have allowed her to avoid liquidation.
¹⁵ Everything within the Chancery Clerk's office is either stored in its original bindings or in the ancient numbered vertical files that were organized in 1932 in a WPA project. The two ledgers designated Will Books I-B and II contain three hundred and sixty two wills written between 1819 and 1919. Will Book I-A has been lost, but its companion, volume one of Wills and Administrations, gives record of the missing wills probated between 1809 and 1820, publishes the inventories, and describes how the estates were managed. Another thirty-six volumes record the inventories and estate administrations through 1906. All documents copied into the will or administration books before 1906 were handwritten by the elected chancery clerk. Everything in the ledgers therefore is subject to misspelling, inaccuracy, and bad penmanship. Most of the original papers are still available for study and organized according to case in the vertical files. Inadequate storage and a long outdated filing system, however, have resulted in extensive damage to and misplacement of some original documents.
As was customary in the nineteenth century, wills were duly recorded in two-foot-tall will books at the time of probate. These records along with inventories and files are still available and easily accessed through the original indices and a compendium organized in the 1940s by lay historians Albert E. Casey and Frances Powell Otken. While Casey initially began the history as a record of his family, the four volumes of Amite County Mississippi, 1699-1865 contain census records, marriage licenses, land grants, property and land conveyances, orphans court records, and abstracts of wills from Amite County's beginning in 1809 through the Civil War. These materials have proven invaluable because Amite County garners only brief mention in most books on Mississippi history. The Casey-Otken book, used in conjunction with J. Paul Mogan's survey of Amite County cemeteries, census records, marriage records, and other public records available at Houston's Clayton Library, provided much of the background information on each of the women whose wills were studied.
¹⁶ All but two of the remaining sixty-four testaments belonged to widows.
¹⁷ Casey and Otkens' compilation of Amite County records do give the dates and names of individuals who participated in land and chattel transactions before 1865. These summaries give the best indication of the frequency and dates when the women in the study acted as a feme sole.
¹⁸ In order to discover where these women originally obtained their holdings, papers belonging to the estates of seventy-one men who bequeathed property to the women in the survey were obtained. From these men's estates this historian traced from whom the women obtained their property. In addition to family ties, circles of friendship and community proved to be important to the women who wrote these wills. Friends and neighbors were sometimes mentioned in the bequeathment or signed the wills as witnesses. These relationships were researched through the church membership rolls included in Volume II of Casey and Otken's Amite County Mississippi, the proximity of families listed in the census records, and by plotting on a map claims filed in land entry books one and two at the courthouse. Vital statistics were obtained through census, cemetery, and marriage records available at the Clayton Library for all but a few individuals.
¹⁹ Wilkinson County, with its county seat at Woodville, was founded in 1801 at the time that the town of Natchez, about forty-five miles away, was declared the territorial capitol. (Richard Aubrey McLemore, ed., A History of Mississippi, Vol. I. [Hattiesburg, MS: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973], p. 197.)
²⁰ The family of Virginia Revolutionary War veteran William Longmire was joined during their 1808 cross county trek by the South Carolinian brothers Holloway and Daniel Huff who married two Longmire daughters and continued to Amite County. They followed the trail blazed by fellow veteran and Virginian Rev Luke Lea, (whose two daughters in law Sabrina Clay Lea and Nancy Clay Lea were first cousins of stateman Henry Clay), South Carolinian John Swearingin, and the George Gayden-Thomas Batchelor families of Aiken South Carolina.
²¹ Hardy Cain's 1814 inventory, preserved in Wills and Administrations Book I in Amite County, includes two quartersections of land, sixty hogs, twenty-two cattle, four horses, six slaves, four axes,two wedges, a lot of hoes and plows, and household furnishings including a cherrywood chest, four beds, and a lot of books. (Inventory of Hardy Cain, 1815, Wills and Administrations, Book I, pp. 142-46) Widow Elizabeth Collins left five slaves valued at $2100 in 1811. (Inventory of Elizabeth Collins, 1811, Wills and Administrations, Book I, pp. 11-14.) Richard Tycer, on the other hand, seemed to live an odd life. This first husband of future testatrix Jane Lowery Tycer Torrance, subsisted with nine hogs, one slave (whom he freed), books, $38 worth of wearing apparel (very expensive), three horses, books, and "a brace of pistols." (Inventory of Richard Tycer, 1811, Wills and Administrations, Book I, pp. 25-29.)
²² More people overall probated wills in Amite County during the 1840s, but more women probated wills during the 1850s. Women wrote twenty of the forty-eight wills probated between 1850 and 1859 as compared the 1840s when women wrote ten of the fifty-nine wills.
²³ The women's wills are used in this comparison because not all of the men's wills are available for an accurate account.
²⁴ In the 1820s, Mary McDonald was the only non slaveholding woman out of five to probate a will. Elizabeth Trentham Perry likewise stood out from the four female testatrixes of the 1830s. Elizabeth Husbands and Nancy Goode were the only two out of ten to not own slaves in the women's wills of the 1840s.
²⁵ None of the three slaveless women who died in the 1850s could sign their names on any of their legal documents. All three were elderly widows who had arrived in the county around the time of its founding; the other four non-slaveowning women of the previous decades could sign their names.
²⁶ The locations of the women's homes was determined through the property rolls and the 1850 Mississippi Census. Their religious affiliations are listed in the church membership rolls in Volume II of Causey and Otken's Amite County Mississippi.
²⁷ The records for both Pike County and Yazoo County from the 1840s have been lost. The Harrington lands in Amite County are entirely within Sections one and two of Township Three, Range 6 in the northeastern corner of the, county just adjacent to Pike County. James Harrington's lands may have been adjacent to the rest of the family property but across the county line. During her first marriage Nancy Harrington did worship in Amite County for she was received as a member of the Pisgah Presbyterian Church on September 231837. (Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, Vol. II, p. 96.)
²⁸ Jeptha Harrington had inherited property from his aunt Sarah Birt Cobb Bradford in 1824. Sarah Birt Cobb had married Benjamin Bradford in her home parish of West Feliciana, LA but after her 1820 wedding had moved to the then sparsely settled northeastern corner of Amite County where by the late 1830s most of the Harrington family continued to live. Benjamin Bradford must have died soon after for her will is part of the original survey; she could not have written her will unless she was no longer married. While there are no other records of other marriages, the number of last names she used and the fact that Sarah Bradford described herself in her will as having "feeble bodily health consider[ing] my advanced life," Benjamin Bradford was probably not her first husband. She left no slaves or money that would indicate her property had been passed on to either Jeptha Herrington or Nancy Williford for her estate consisted entirely of livestock, fodder, and farm implements. (Will of Sarah Birt Cobb Bradford, 1824, Amite County Will book Vol. I p. 52; Inventory of the Estate of Sarah Birt Cobb Bradford, 1824, Amite County Archive File 16.)
²⁹ Will of Nancy L. Williford, 1840, Amite County Will Book, Vol. I, p. 210.
³⁰ John V. Wren was either the half brother or uncle-in-law of married testatrix Victoria Batchelor Buckholtz Street through her mother Rebecca Gayden Wren Batchelor . The en mass migration of the Gayden-Batchelor families from South Carolina is detailed in later pages.
³¹ Land Conveyance Record, in Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, Vol. I, p. 332.
³² 1850 United States Census.
³³ Lemuel Reams' personal estate was much more valuable. In the inventory compiled in 1853, Reams had an estimated worth of $6456.95 having owned extensive livestock, personal goods, and the ten slaves inherited from his wife. Because most of these servants were children and young adults, in the two years since his wife's death, their estimated value had gone up. Whereas Lot 3 in Ann Reams' inventory was worth $4360.00, after Reams' death, these same slaves were valued $4750.00. (Amite County Archive File 160.)
³⁴ Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, Vol. I, p. 265.
³⁵ The contract is recorded the Amite County Land Conveyance book in Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, Vol I, p. 303.
³⁶ Records indicate that Richard Watkins continued to work land that his father had claimed in 1811 about seven miles away from the Reams' place. Ann Reams had probably been hiring out her slaves for some time; the 1836 contract between the then widow Ann Watkins and Lemuel Reams may have involved the rent of her labor force. (1850 U.S. Census, in Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, p. 76.; Amite County Probate Record, Vol. 15, p. 266.; Casey and Otken estimate the real estate value of $300 to be 150 acres. (Casey and Otken, Amite County, Mississippi, p. 127.); Will of Ann C. Reams, 1851, Amite County Will Book, Vol. II, pp. 16-17.
³⁷ The county files have no record of another will.
³⁸ At the time of the 1850 census, twenty-four year-old Dr. William Kinabrew was also living in the Richardson Johns household. Five years later he would marry Sarah Atkinson, the daughter of the John's neighbor and fellow Ebeneezer Baptist Church member Aletha Dixon. Kinabrew's older brother James, also a physician, lived with their eldest brother John G. and his family in the northern part of the county. William Kinabrew may have moved to establish his own practice away from that of his brothers. (1850 U.S. Census).
³⁹ Will of Elizabeth Johns, 1858, Amite County Will Book, Vol. II, p. 117.
Whether William Johns wished to contest his mother's last will in favor of a previous document, or because he believed the terms of the will to be wrong is unclear. William P. Johns was twenty-eight at the time of his mother's death and had probably already begun to set up a household of his own. In 1850, nine years before, William still was at home but listed as a farmer on the census. His share of his mother's eight slaves could have helped him get established in agriculture. (1850 U.S. Census)

CONTINUE TO THESIS NOTES - PART TWO
 

THESIS INDEX  PAGE
    INTRODUCTION
    CHAPTER 1: A Circle of Neighbors and Kin - PART A  1839-1858
      CHAPTER 1: A Circle of Neighbors and Kin - PART B   1859-1860
    CHAPTER 2: The Civil War & After
    CHAPTER 3:  Town Matrons and Store Fronts
    CONCLUSION
    NOTES - PART ONE
      NOTES - PART TWO
      NOTES - PART THREE
 
 

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