William H. Wilson, executor of the will of the late Stephen Mazyck, seeks the court's permission to sell the estate according to "the trusts of the Testator's will." Mazyck's 1832 will attached several contingencies to a bequest of twenty slaves to Susan Simons Mazyck. Because "many different opinions have been expressed" regarding this bequest, Wilson is "compelled" to seek the court's interpretation of the clause. Wilson contends that the estate should be sold, "because it cannot be well managed in its present state and does not improve." He fears it "will go to decay" before the infant heirs are "in a condition to take possession of it." In addition, "the plantation is not productive and the negroes not orderly nor thriving: that in fact the negroes have often ran away and committed crimes, for which one was executed and another stript after a public whipping." Wilson's co-executor, Robert Mazyck, will not consent to a sale of the property. The petitioner asks the court to order the sale of the estate and to protect him "in executing the said trusts" by their decree.
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
