I thought it was somewhat common for wills to state that the slaves should be freed upon the owner’s death, perhaps as a way to assuage their conscience for something deep down they knew to be wrong, but it was rare for the slaves to actually be freed by the heirs?
Many wills put some form of provision on the freedom - such as, in this case, being within five years, rather than immediately. In most cases, however, the wills were carried out unless the heirs themselves found a strong reason to dispute them - even Lee here only asks for an extension, precisely because he does not have a strong legal basis to dispute the will on a fundamental level.
At the end of the day, it depended on how adept the heir - and their lawyers - were at manipulating the legal system, and just how bad the legal system of their particular state was.
Mass emancipation was unusual at this point in the South, though - slavery had become increasingly ideological in the South since the 1830s, with a whole bizarre system of philosophical justification for why brutalizing human beings was not only okay, but morally correct.
I thought it was somewhat common for wills to state that the slaves should be freed upon the owner’s death, perhaps as a way to assuage their conscience for something deep down they knew to be wrong, but it was rare for the slaves to actually be freed by the heirs?
Many wills put some form of provision on the freedom - such as, in this case, being within five years, rather than immediately. In most cases, however, the wills were carried out unless the heirs themselves found a strong reason to dispute them - even Lee here only asks for an extension, precisely because he does not have a strong legal basis to dispute the will on a fundamental level.
At the end of the day, it depended on how adept the heir - and their lawyers - were at manipulating the legal system, and just how bad the legal system of their particular state was.
Mass emancipation was unusual at this point in the South, though - slavery had become increasingly ideological in the South since the 1830s, with a whole bizarre system of philosophical justification for why brutalizing human beings was not only okay, but morally correct.