Legal Sparring Ongoing Over Ownership of Law's Papers

By Deborah Fitts

 COLUMBIA, S.C. — An attempt by the State of South Carolina to seize the papers of a Confederate general from his descendants is now heading for action in the 4th U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.

“We want to place these in their rightful place — in the state archives,” said Trey Walker, spokesman for South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. “The state has proven that it has sufficient evidence” that it owns the documents.

At issue are more than 440 wartime letters and documents once in the possession of Gen. Evander McIver Law. A bankruptcy court estimated their value at $2.4 million.

In August 2004, McMaster served a temporary restraining order on an auction house in Columbia, the day before Law’s great-great-nephew, Thomas Law Wilcox, of Seabrook Island, planned to sell them. McMaster asserted that the papers belong to South Carolina because they were among the official documents the government spirited out of the state capital in February 1865 as the Union army advanced on the city.

A federal bankruptcy judge ruled in August 2005 in the state’s favor. But last January U.S. District Judge Patrick Michael Duffy, in Charleston, S.C., ruled that the letters were not public documents and they belong to Wilcox after all.

Among the papers are three handwritten dispatches by Robert E. Lee from late 1861 and early ’62, a letter from Wade Hampton offering to raise a cavalry outfit, several letters by Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, and letters to and from the state’s two wartime governors.

According to Walker, on Feb. 16, 1865, with Union forces under William T. Sherman threatening Columbia, the state’s official papers were put aboard a train and sent away. Law was apparently involved. Late the same year, nearly all the papers returned to Columbia, and it is not known how or why Law retained the group of 444.

According to Wilcox’s attorney, Wilcox received the collection from his aunt, Blanche Law, the general’s granddaughter. The documents, still in Wilcox’s possession, are reportedly stored in a bank vault awaiting the outcome of the case.

In his January ruling in favor of Wilcox, Judge Duffy stated, “The State has failed to prove that the documents were public records when they were produced. The State’s interest in them now does not retroactively make them so.” Duffy pointed to an 1880 decision that held that when private individuals are allowed by government to take public documents, “they necessarily lose their character as public records.”

According to Walker, briefs were due in the appeals court by May 9, with oral arguments probably to be scheduled for September. A decision is likely in 2007, he predicted.

The original story, “South Carolina Claims Documents General's Family Wants To Sell,” is in the News Archives at www.civilwarnews.com