Taxation & Estate Planning

Gone With the Wind and Trusts

By Joel A. Schoenmeyer

I'm working my way through Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind right now -- it's so long, this may well be the last book I read this year. It's surprisingly good, though -- I was expecting a bit of a bodice ripper, but the writing is very solid, and quite evocative.

One thing we learn: trusts were around even in the Old South. This is from page 107 in the edition I'm reading (my mother's MacMillan second edition). It describes the strained relationship between Sarah Jane Hamilton (aka Aunt Pittypat) and her brother Henry, and the aunt and uncle of Scarlett O'Hara's deceased husband Charles, and Charles's sister, Melanie:

The insult had occurred on a day when Pitty wished to draw five hundred dollars from her estate, of which [Henry] was trustee, to invest in a nonexistent gold mine. He had refused to permit it and stated heatedly that she had no more sense than a June bug and furthermore it gave him the fidgets to be around her longer than five minutes.

We also learn the following:

Uncle Henry like Scarlett immediately because, he said, he could see that for all her silly affectations she had a few grains of sense. He was trustee, not only of Pitty's and Melanie's estates, but also of that left Scarlett by Charles. It came to Scarlett as a pleasant surprise that she was now a well-to-do young woman, for Charles had not only left her half of Aunt Pitty's house but farm lands and town property as well.

Full post as published by Death and Taxes Blog on December 03, 2007 (boomark / email).