The Supreme Court Shopping Binge: Unlayering a Court Document

Not long ago, a historian friend surprised me with an email referring to “the high-rollin’ kids” of my ancestor, Jacob Mayberry. He included a link to a summary report of the Alabama Supreme Court case of Sanford v. Howard.[1] In the eleven-page summary, I learned that Jacob’s kids had created a Supreme Court–caliber stir by shopping. They had racked up a huge tab at a local store, buying luxuries in 1852, the year after their father died. Their uncle, executor of Jacob’s estate, had refused to pay the tab.

I love unraveling complex documents like this one, layer by layer. The more I learn, the more I want to know. COVID-19 wariness has kept me from going after the full Supreme Court and lower court records yet, so I have just been unlayering this case summary. Each layer I’ve pulled back and analyzed, my ancestors and their neighbors, town, and time have come into fuller focus. I expect to have much fun with this Mayberry escapade for years to come, as the other documents enrich the story.

The Gist of the Mayberry Shopping Saga

This Supreme Court summary report is an outer layer of a much deeper story, but here is the gist. You met my 3^rd great-grandfather, Jacob Newell Mayberry, in my last post, the one about researching neighbors. He was a tavernkeeper, hotelier, planter, and owner of the town’s toll bridge. He died on Christmas Eve, 1851, at the age of sixty-five. Two daughters and a son had preceded him in death, but six children remained as his heirs, ages seven to sixteen. They were living with their mother in Centreville, Alabama, as Jacob’s estate was probated and settled in 1852.

In the months after Jacob’s death, the children wanted to shop at Charles Sanford’s store in town, as they often had when Jacob was alive. Now, though, it required the intervention of their Uncle George Howard, executor of Jacob’s estate. Howard went to Sanford’s store and told him and his clerk that they could give the Mayberry children anything they wanted. They were to keep a tab for each child, and Howard would settle the debt at the end of the year or when the crop came in. And the shopping began.

The two teenaged girls—Priscilla (called “Prill”) and Theresa (called “Trecy”), 17 and 16 respectively—were the biggest spenders, continuing their established habit of wearing the newest and finest clothes. The younger children sent enslaved persons to do their shopping for them. The amount of the 1852 bill is not disclosed, but the bill at Sanford’s store in the last year of Jacob’s life was reportedly similar, amounting to $2,600. If the officialdata.org calculator is reliable, today, that would amount to over $86,000.[2]

When Howard received the bill, he refused to pay it. The summary gives little detail, but it appears Howard blamed Sanford for letting the children buy unnecessary things, and he claimed he was not obligated to pay for what the enslaved people removed from the store. Sanford sued him and simultaneously sued each of the children, who apparently asked him to do so, in their guilt over the unpaid debt. Prill even agreed to testify for Sanford. Sanford lost the case in Chancery Court and appealed. He lost the appeal, also, and took it to the Alabama Supreme Court, which overturned the lower-court rulings.

Legalities at the Outer Layer

Making sense of this case as a legal battle was the first tough layer to peel back in the story of the Mayberry Shopping Binge. Legalese is its own language. And it feels no obligation to explain itself to us civilians. I tackled the layer with the help of Black’s Law Dictionary, 2^nd edition. In Zotero, I began a collection of the legal terms I encountered throughout the summary: “bill of exceptions,” “plead the general issue,” “res gestae”? Combining the dictionary’s entries with a study of the context surrounding the terms, they started to make a glimmer of sense—enough sense to keep plodding through, anyway.

The Cast of Characters

My next layer to peel back was the cast of characters. I found it valuable to collect information about the people mentioned or implied in the text. The summary only tells me the children were under twenty-one, mentioning only Prill by name. Knowing their names and ages paints a clearer picture. I wanted to know where the various people lived, in relationship to each other. I wanted to know who the lawyers were, and whether they were related to the key people in the case.

I also paid attention to those who were not mentioned in the summary, but should have been, and those only mentioned in generalities. More on that later.

It’s Not Just Business, It’s Personal

Sanford v. Howard was not a glamorous case, to be sure; it’s about someone defaulting on maxed-out credit. But it is packed with value for a genohistorian, maybe even the more so for being a mundane matter. I had a glimpse at everyday life, at least for a Mayberry.

I knew the Mayberrys were wealthy, but I did not know that they were ostentatiously rich until I heard how much they spent on clothes in a single store. (The case summary indicates they were shopping in other stores in town, too, by the way.) But I was also intrigued to learn of their embarrassment and guilt over the debt. They felt a social responsibility, perhaps? A code of honor?

Or maybe it was more personal than that. Remember the last post again—where I laid out the interconnected families in sixteen Centreville households in 1850?  The Mayberrys lived in household #15. Household #14—the next house up the road—was boarding Charles Sanford Sr. and his son Charles Jr., who was just a year or two older than Prill Mayberry. And in household #16? Uncle George Howard. This ugly case, which went on from 1853 until 1856, was a dust-up between close neighbors—people who  might see each other every day. The Mayberry kids—especially Prill—must have felt they were robbing the kid next door.

Questions and More Questions

Pondering the children and this predicament, I find myself wondering what role their mother was playing in this. Did she have any say at all? She is completely absent from the court summary—not even implied as a character in this. Was she pulling the moral strings, I wonder? Was she the one who sent the children to tell Charles Sanford they wanted the debt paid, encouraging him to sue them?

And what about their legal guardians? They are not mentioned in the summary, either. This gives me the first of many questions I want to pursue in the lower-court documents, if they have survived in detail. Just how complicated was this for my eight-year-old great-great-grandfather, Jacob Dennis Mayberry–his father’s namesake? Who had the power over his life and his inheritance? I suspect it was fully and completely in the hands of Uncle George.

I find myself further intrigued by the role of the enslaved people who are mentioned. What man or woman or child did little Jacob Jr. have the power to send to town, and what did he want that person to bring back? How common was it in Centreville, Alabama, for an enslaved man or woman to walk into a store, fill a basket, and put their purchases on a tab? Something tells me it was a common practice. Was George Howard, then, the only man who used this circumstance to get out of paying a debt?

How did this trouble affect the children’s relationship with their uncle, I also wonder? Prill testified against him. And the other children defied him when they encouraged Sanford to sue them personally. What money did they have that was not under the control of Uncle George, as the executor? And what does that tell us about the larger implications of losing a parent or a husband in this time and place?

Where Do We Go from Here?

Almost every sentence in a Supreme Court case summary can raise new questions. To peel back the deeper layers of this case, my next effort will be to get the records available for all three cases—Chancery, Appellate, and Supreme. I expect to learn much about the laws and justice system of the time, the culture of Centreville, the character of the people involved, the responsibilities of executors and guardians, and the conditions for widows and children without fathers.

This unlayering of a situation so mundane as overextended credit has the power to reveal a long-ago world in multifaceted shades. Though these records are not often digitized, they are worth the effort to mine for the sort of information a genohistorian craves.

A Call to Action

Check Supreme Court case summaries in the state where your ancestors lived. They are often summarized and searchable, and you can easily see if your ancestors’ names appear. Though brief, they can be packed with insights and are worth the time to parse. Keep in mind that your ancestors might be among the unnamed, generalized, or implied characters in a case. You might want to search for the people who surrounded them.

As always, I encourage you to comment below with your experiences of using court records. If you are enjoying Genohistory on Purpose, please sign up for my newsletter and share this post with your friends. And don’t forget to check out the Zotero Notes below, if you’re a Zotero user.

[1] John W. Shepherd (state reporter), Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Alabama during June Term, 1856, and a Part of January Term, 1857, vol. 29 (Montgomery, Ala.: Barrett & Wimbish, Printers, 1857), https://books.google.com/books?id=aUFFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA684.

[2] Ian Webster, “Inflation Calculator,” U.S. Official Inflation Data, accessed June 17, 2020, https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1851.

Creating a Shared Event

In documenting a case like Sanford v. Howard, where numerous people share a single event, here is a way to set it up in Zotero with minimal repetition.

Step 1: Pick a place to create a subcollection to hold the shared event. In this case, I decided to create it under my collection for Jacob Newell Mayberry—the deceased father—since he was the one person that tied most of the characters together. Store all of your research documents related to the case here (unless they are documents that might be used for other things, like maps and legal terms).

Step 2: Create an “index” note beginning with an underscore, so that it always floats to the top of the event subcollection. I called mine “_Sanford v. Howard (Supreme Court 1856).” I created a brief description of the event, then a description of where I’ve stored the subcollection. Also, using the Zutilo add-on, I was able to paste a link to the subcollection, so I can quickly jump to the collection, no matter where this note shows up.

Step 3: As you begin to work on the characters who shared the event, drag and drop this note into the collection you are building about each individual (assuming you are doing that). The note becomes an alert in the person’s folder that they were connected to this event. And, it takes you there for information.

This method prevents you from duplicating substantial information in every folder. You only have to build the shared event’s folder once. If you want to know where you’ve dragged and dropped the note, just click on it and hold down your Control key. Zotero will highlight every folder that contains the note.

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