Live Blogging from the Archives

What do we do in Chapel Hill on cold, overcast Sunday afternoons in winter?  Spend time in the archives, of course!  I'll be talking soon about the constitutional origins of secession -- and in preparation for this, I'm reading some more about UVA law professor James Holcombe.  (You may recall I wrote about a frightfully difficult exam he gave at The University in 1859 some time back.)  There's a lot -- a lot -- that needs to be said about Professor Holcombe's legal ideas.  But right now I want to focus on a vignette about his uncle, which seems like it should go straight into the trusts and estate course as a very amusing story:

Uncle Thomas Anderson Holcombe was ... educated as a lawyer and practiced awhile in lower Virginia.  He was one day summoned to the bedside of a Miss Royall, a homely old maid, 10 years older than himself, with whom he had a slight acquaintance.  She was said to be dying and wished to make a will.  To the amazement of the young lawyer, the good spinster bequethed to him the bulk of her property, assigning as her reason the vast and unappeasable love she had conceived for him, declaring that she could not die in peace until he accepted her offering.  To the astonishment of everybody and the chagrin of my uncle, Miss Royall recovered and common gratitude, as everyone knows, demanded that he should make her Mrs. Holcombe.

Actually, there's a ton more substantive things to talk about in what I'm reading now, about concern over keeping property within the family -- and disinheriting children if they stray from the parents' wishes, and all other manner of stuff on wills.  But that will have to await the paper that Doug Thie and I are writing on probate in Rockbridge County, Virginia, from the 1830s to the 1850s.  Never ceases to surprise me how much people in the old south worried about family and property.

Turns out, by the way, that Mary Royall and Thomas A. Holcombe were born the same year (1785).

Comments

[Jon Weinberg]

Al,
Here's a snippet from a footnote in the current draft of a paper I'm putting together:

Of the fourteen laws enacted by the 1696 Virginia assembly, nine stemmed from petition. Bailey, supra n. 275, at 19; compare 3 Hening’s Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia 137-67 (1696), available at http://vagenweb.org/hening/vol03.htm, with 3 Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia 65-79 (H.R. McIlwaine ed.) (1696-97) [available on HeinOnline]. One of those Virginia petition-prompted statutes recited that “many great and grievous mischeifes have arisen and dayly doe arise by clandestine and secret marriages to the utter ruin of many heirs and heiresses and to the great greif of all the relations.” It imposed stiff fines on ministers who solemnized marriages without publication of banns as set out in the statute; forbade county clerks to issue marriage licenses without parental permission; and modified inheritance law to nullify the effects of certain noncomplying marriages. See Hening, supra, at 150-51. The House Journal doesn’t recite the circumstances of the petition, and one can only wonder.

[AGR]

What a great story...great and scary. I am with you. Property and family were all to those folks.

[Alfred Brophy]

Jon--that's what I'm talking about! Keeping property within the family. I'd love to read your paper when you're circulating it for comments.

There's a great vignette in the diary about how a china set given by LaFayette to the family was lost when an elderly man married a younger woman and then on his death the set went to his widow rather than his daughters. Also, some stuff on a struggle within the family over emancipation via will.

Of course I agree with you, Annette -- our foremost expert on family in the old South and its shifting meaning over time. What I want to spend some more time with down the road is the shift from Holcombe's parents' ideas about slavery (they freed their human property and then moved to Indiana) and Holcombe's -- he is perhaps best remembered for arguing that slavery was consistent with natural law.