In his will, John Cutler gave to his son Bryan his "Negro" man named Joseph Caswell, his house, and plantation, "after myself & wife's death." Following John Cutler's death in 1844, and his son's death in 1849, his wife Catharine sold Joseph Caswell. The purchaser was either a man named Henry Hodges or a man named Hill. Following the sale, Joseph Caswell was transported out of the state. In 1852, Miles A. H. McKeil, administrator of Bryan Cutler's estate, filed suit, charging the widow with fraud for selling the slave on whom she did not have "an absolute estate." Before the proceedings got under way, however, Catharine died. Now McKeil is again trying to recover the slave, or his value, for the estate. This sale "was done secretly and in fraud of the rights of the said Bryan and his legal representatives," McKeil says. He asks that the administrator of Catharine Cutler's estate, N. W. North, be required to "pay over to your Orator the assets that may be in his hands in a sufficiency thereof to compensate your Orator for the value of said slave." A related Supreme Court case report reveals that Catharine Cutler, aided and abetted by the other defendant, Caleb Cutler, sold Joseph Caswell, who had been charged with homicide, in order to spirit him away and shield him from the reach of the law.
Result: Granted.
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Repository: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina
