Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

7-18-2009

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Financial Planning Research Network; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; FinPlanRN Subject Matter eJournals

Abstract

This paper combines an empirical study of probate in Greene County Alabama one of the wealthiest counties in the United States in the years leading into Civil War with a qualitative examination of property doctrine and ideology at that time The data address three key themes in recent trusts and estates literature First what testators did with their extraordinary wealth in particular how they worked to maintain property within their families and especially how male testators were suspicious of loss of their familys wealth through their daughters marriages Second the testators used sophisticated trust mechanisms for both managing property and keeping it within their families In the antebellum era Americans celebrated the ways they harnessed technologies from the steam engine to the telegraph and printing press to create wealth and improve society This study reveals that trusts should be added to that list of technologies that assisted in the creation and management of wealth Finally the data reveal 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 wealthWhile some in the United States at the time including some jurists as well as politicians and novelists questioned the desirability to our country of inheritance the Greene County data show an extraordinary devotion to maintenance of family wealth The findings in The Most Esteemed Act of My Life invite further study in other places in the South as well as in the North to test the extent to which the existence of wealth particularly a wealth based on human property led to different patterns of bequest from those seen among some of our nations wealthiest individuals at critical period of American history

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