The Croom Family and the Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives

Abstract

The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives. By William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 290. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) Over the last two decades, several historians have published illuminating studies that have clarified the role of the family within antebellum southern society. Most of these works drew their conclusions from examining the collective experience of numerous families among the South's planter elite. In contrast, William Warren Rogers and Erica R. Clark, in The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation: Land, Litigation, and Southern Lives, trace the history of one planter family from its colonial foundations through the Civil War era. Aside from participating in the settlement of the cotton frontier in Florida, the subjects of this study became entangled in a complicated lawsuit that eventually produced an important precedent in American jurisprudence. Rogers and Clark begin with an account of the life of William Croom, a North Carolina planter born on the eve of the American Revolution, but the authors' focus quickly shifts to the careers of two of William's sons. Hardy and Bryan Croom grew up with the cotton kingdom and devoted their adult years to their business and planting interests, though Hardy also gained renown as an amateur botanist. By the late 1820s, William, Hardy, and Bryan had invested in several tracts in the Florida territory, including Hardy's Leon County plantation, which later came to be known as Goodwood. Despite fragile health, Hardy traveled frequently between his North Carolina home in New Bern, his Florida holdings, and New York City, the location preferred by his wife, Frances Smith Croom. In the 1830s, Hardy spent more time in Florida than anywhere else and expressed his desire to move there permanently. Frances, however, cared little either for frontier conditions or for the danger presented by the Seminole War. Eventually, the couple compromised by agreeing to relocate to Charleston, a cultured urban center situated closer to Hardy's Florida possessions. Hardy and Frances never completed this move, however, for in October 1837, the couple and their three children were tragically killed when a storm destroyed the steamship S. S. Home on a return trip from New York. Family members and friends believed that Hardy had prepared a will, but the document was never found, so his closest brother and business associate, Bryan, assumed control of Hardy's estate. Yet Henrietta Smith and Richard Armistead, Frances's mother and brother-in-law, respectively, filed suit against Bryan. Hardy, they argued, had been a legal resident of North Carolina; according to that state's law, an estate passed first to an intestate's male children and then to the child's closest next of kin. Witnesses to the shipwreck testified that Hardy probably had died before his ten-year-old son, and that after the boy's death, Henrietta Smith became the heir to Hardy's possessions. Bryan's counsel countered that no solid evidence existed that Hardy had died before his son; even if he had, the fact that Hardy had voted in a Florida election made him a legal resident of the territory, and territorial statute prescribed that an estate should pass to the paternal side of the deceased's family. After nearly two decades of legal maneuvering and rejected settlements, the Florida Supreme Court in 1857 decided in Smith's and Armistead's favor. …