I'm delighted to report that a study that Doug Thie and I have been working on for what seems like forever, "Land, Slaves, and Bonds: Trust and Probate in the Pre-Civil War Shenandoah Valley" is finally up on ssrn. We started working on this way back in the summer of 2010 when Doug was still a student here. We sampled wills probated in Rockbridge County, Virginia, from 1820 to 1861, with a couple of purposes in mind. First, we wanted to gauge the changes in the sophistication of wills over that period, as the economy was really taking off. (This is the period often called the market revolution — though there's a heated debate among historians whether revolution is the right word for this. But leaving that dispute aside, printing and transportation became much cheaper over this time, so you'd also expect legal knowledge to circulate more widely than it had before.) We also were interested in the devices testators used to manage their property after they had passed away; how they tried to provide for their families with life estates, by putting property in trust, or by making outright gifts. I saw this as a nice comparison with the study Stephen Davis wrote now a number of years ago on Greene County, Alabama and also Jason Kirklin's very nice study of probate in Indiana before the Civil War. Finally, we were interested in how the wills dealt with enslaved people –most often distributing them to family members, but sometimes holding them in "quasi-freedom," and in a few instances freeing them either after a widow passed away or even outright. There are some really rich stories that emerge from this research — you never know what you're going to find in wills.
Often the wills provide for a surviving spouse and put property in trust for daughters and leave property outright to son. In subsequent studies I want to look really closely at the differences between male and female testators in what they do with their property and how the men seem to leave property in trust for their daughters more frequently than do women. Perhaps this is just an artifact of a small sample size here — or maybe there are some really interesting differences between testators based on gender in this period. Some of the stories are about trusts to care for disabled family members; others are of how there are distinctions based on whether children helped care for the testators or had already received their inheritance. God I love trusts and estates — it's so much about humanity and families. Maybe I'll talk a little bit more in depth about some of the implications of our findings later this summer; I'm particularly interested in how the trusts become more complex over the forty years we studied.
Anyway, the paper is up on ssrn. "'Land, Slaves, and Bonds': Trust and Probate in the Shenandoah Valley" is now out in the West Virginia Law Review.
The illustration is of the Shendandoah Valley, which I took on a trip there back in July 2010 when we were first starting this. Four years. Yikes this has been brewing for a long time. The next paper will be with Katherine Van Wie on probate in Montgomery and I can say the preliminary analysis is most interesting. Maybe then I'll hit the courthouse in Wilcox County for their records. No telling where this is leading… perhaps back to Dallas County (Selma)?