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Confederate decendent wins Common Law case

Court rules Confederate letters not public documents

By LARRY O'DELL
Associated Press Writer
October 27, 2006

RICHMOND, Va. -- A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a descendent of a Confederate officer, not the state of South Carolina, owns more than 440 original Civil War letters valued at $2.4 million.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court's ruling that Thomas Willcox of Seabrook Island, S.C., owns the documents that apparently have been in his family for more than 140 years.

The panel said South Carolina failed to provide evidence of ownership to overcome the common law presumption that property is owned by the person who possesses it.

"That possession is nine-tenths of the law is a truism hardly bearing repetition," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the unanimous opinion. "Statements to that effect have existed almost as long as the common law itself."

The state could overcome that presumption by providing evidence of recent prior possession of the property but failed to do so, Wilkinson wrote. He said there also was no evidence that the papers were public property under state law in the 1860s.

According to the court, the papers--including correspondence from Gen. Robert E. Lee--apparently were gathered by Confederate Maj. Gen. Evander McIver Law during the 1865 attack on the South Carolina capital by Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Law was Willcox's great-great-uncle.

Willcox found the papers in 1999 or 2000 in a shopping bag in a closet at his late stepmother's home. Much of the correspondence was from Confederate officers to Govs. Francis Pickens and Milledge Bonham.

South Carolina obtained a temporary restraining order the day before Willcox planned to sell the papers at auction.

Wilkinson was joined in the ruling by Judge Paul V. Niemeyer and visiting U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson.

http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/061179.P.pdf

_____________________
David Upton

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