Robert Smalls’s Tax Title and the Endurance of Land Redistribution in Port Royal, South Carolina
Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Date
2024
In DeTreville v. Smalls, an 1879 case from Port Royal, South Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that titles to land that had been sold in “insurrectionary districts” for federal tax delinquency during the Civil War would be considered presumptively valid. This meant that former landowners who had lost their land for tax noncompliance would generally be unable to regain possession of that land by challenging the tax sales in court. Even if the wartime tax sales had been irregular (and they very much had been), the Court declared in DeTreville that it would not wrench the land back from the...
Citation
Cynthia L. Nicoletti, Robert Smalls’s Tax Title and the Endurance of Land Redistribution in Port Royal, South Carolina, in The War that Made America, University of North Carolina Press, 141–162 (2024).