Academic

The Death at Hot Springs and the Exhumation of the Slave Child

By Alfred Brophy

Now that I've written a little bit about the paper Stephen Davis and I have  on antebellum trusts and estates -- and especially on the context of Greene County, Alabama,  demographics of the testators, the use of trusts, and the efforts at emancipation in a few of the wills,  I'd like to talk about a couple of vignettes from the wills we studied.  One is about a testator, Harris Tinker, the most affluent testator we studied.  He owned about 130 people according to the 1840 census.  He died while vacationing at Hot Springs, Virginia (here's a picture of it from the late antebellum era at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' website, from Edward Beyer's Album of Virginia--more stuff that will go into the next edition of "Property and Progress").  You know -- the location of the Homestead. Tinker's will, which was written while at Hot Springs, was somewhat different in form from many of the other wills.  All of this attests to regional differences in format of trusts; though the basic law was the same.

The vignette that I found most surprising of all of the wills was a request by a testator, John Pickens, that a slave child, Alfred, who had predeceased him be exhumed and buried at his feet.   Here's the astonishing request:

Having lost my much devoted little boy Alfred, who I do think possessed the finest disposition of any child I ever knew, and being ardently attached to him, I do hereby desire that his remains by taken up and deposited at my feet whenever I may be buried. This request may seem singular, but really if I though tit would be neglected I would die miserable.  I will remark that for years of my illness I was much troubled with cold feet in the winter and the application of hot bricks answered only as temporary relief, this little fellow remarked that if I would let him sleep at my feet that he would keep theme warm, which I consented to and derived much comfort form the experiment.   I therefore desire that when I am laid in my last bed that he may occupy the same position that he was allowed to do when we were living.

What do we make of this?  Lord only knows.  One of my students wondered if the stuff about feet warmed was a euphemism for something else.  I hadn't thought of that.  But who knows?  You ever heard of anything like this before?  I didn't think so.  Further evidence that you never know what you're going to find in the archives, do you?!

And with that, this series of posts on our paper is almost over --I'll have some thoughts on new directions with this kind of research in a few days.  If you're a law review editor, please be on the lookout for this paper; we'll be sending it in in another week or so.

By the way, if you find an original of Beyer's Album of Virginia in your grandparents' attic, save it. Because it's worth real money.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on August 10, 2009 (boomark / email).