Thomas and Henrietta Heath seek to sell a portion of the slaves in whom Henrietta has a "life estate." They state that Henrietta's father, the late John Warren, devised forty-eight slaves to said Henrietta "for and during the term of her natural life." They further avow that their two children and Henrietta's granddaughter hold a remainder interest in said slaves. The Heaths maintain "that the Negroes have greatly encreased in number and have now become too large a gang to be profitably employed on the plantation devised to your Oratrix by her Father ... That the land too is miserably poor and worn out and its further culture seems almost a waste of labour." They charge that twenty-four of the said slaves "have acquired idle and immoral habits and are most of them insubordinate and almost wholly unmanageable." Characterizing said slaves as "burdensome and expensive," the Heaths pray that the minor defendants be summoned and that "a sale of a portion of the said Negroes might be permitted ... upon this condition that the proceeds should be invested subject to the same limitations and conditions expressed and set forth in the said Testators last Will and testament."
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
