Elizabeth Smith and her five minor siblings ask the court to attach several slaves now in the possession of Arkey Y. Partee and to require Partee to "give bond & security for the forthcoming of all sd negroes with their increase" at the termination of their mother's life estate. In 1826 the petitioners' father conveyed the slaves to William Yancy for the use of their mother, Nancy Hobson Smith, during her natural life and "after her death the sd negroes with their increase if any to be equally divided between all her children." Yancy hired out a seventeen-year-old female slave named Gilley, and the profits she generated were intended to support Nancy. Noting that their father and their trustee have died, the Smiths aver that Gilley and her seven children are now in Partee's possession, "by what right he claims [them] or ... how he got possession of them your oratrices & orators know not." The petitioners fear that, considering the "difficiency of his title to sd negroes," Partee will "run them off" beyond the jurisdiction of the court. Two years later, Partee filed his cross bill asking the court to nullify the 1826 deed of trust and make "good and valid" his title to Gilley and her children. Partee claimed that he acquired the slaves when they were levied upon and that the deed of trust between Smith and Yancy was created to defraud Smith's creditors. After the filing of the original petition, the twice-widowed Nancy Yancy Hobson Smith remarried and by the time she died, sometime before 1850, her name was Nancy Wilson.
Result: Granted; appealed; affirmed.
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Repository: Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee
