Wade Hampton seeks compensation for money expended by him to save the estate of William Ransom Davis for Davis' heirs. William Davis died in December 1799, leaving "about eighty or ninety negroes, besides some lands of inconsiderable value." Davis owed more than $33,500, a sum which far exceeded the value of his estate. Davis' wife Martha asked Hampton, a family friend, "to save if possible, out of the property ... a subsistence for, and the means of educating" her five children. Hampton paid various debts and bought some of the slaves that had been confiscated by the sheriff for sale. He states that Davis's wife sent 51 slaves to work for him in 1802 "at a reasonable hire to be allowed and applied to the reduction" of the debts. He further avers that he wrote an account of the expenditures he had made on behalf of the estate and the credit accumulated by the slaves' work when two of the Davis children turned twenty-one. Dissatisfied, John N. Davis and Warren R. Davis refused to accept the account. Since then, Hampton reports, the slaves have been running away in groups back to the Davis plantation on Santee, probably encouraged by the Davises. Only thirteen slaves remain, and Hampton has had to imprison them to prevent them from running away too. Hampton asks the court to settle the financial matters and claims and to award him compensation for his expenditures on the Davis estate.
Result: Partially granted.
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
