Family and Inheritance: A Wilkinson Case

 Family and Inheritance:  The Wilkinson Case


My paternal grandfather and name-sake,  J. Edgar Wilkinson, who died soon after I was born, was a private firm lawyer practicing in Philadelphia’s Orphans’ Court.  We call that probate court in Minnesota and it addresses disputes over the deads’ estates and wills and oversees trusts and guardianships.  I was told he spent a lot of time seeing to it that the needs of widows and orphans were attended to.  But I know nothing about his practice save the following story I have pieced together.


In a case where he was appointed guardian of an older man, Brooks, there was much at stake.  It was alleged in the Philadelphia court filing that led to J. Edgar Wilkinson’s appointment, that Brooks was "feeble minded and unable to properly care for his property; that he was the victim of designing persons; that large sums of money had been secured and extorted from him …”  The guardianship, with its first stop in Philadelphia, ended up in the Massachusetts Supreme Court which affirmed granddad’s authority as guardian to act in Massachusetts and require a Massachusetts conservator (who had lost authority in the Pennsylvania ruling)  to turn over Brooks’ property to his care.  The decision noted that he had posted $180,000 in surety bonds - in 1925 dollars - equivalent to $3 million today.  Wilkinson v. McIntyre, et al., 150 N.E. 228, (Mass. 1926).  We can see which side of the economic divide in the U.S. he was working on.


I have not fully confirmed the identity of the ward, William Gray Brooks.  He very probably was the Brooks who was a Massachusetts native said to be descended from Cotton Mather and the founder of Phillips Exeter Academy and brother (and heir) of a highly regarded Episcopal bishop in Boston.  


It also seems that he was a lawyer who himself was involved in litigation of large estate claims.   William Gray Brooks was a party in one decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Blagge v. Balch, Codman v. Brooks, et al  162 U.S. 439 (1896). That case related to how tax money from an 1885 Act of Congress was to be distributed among the heirs of the owner of the brig Mary.  The Mary had been seized by a French privateer in 1797 during a brief war between the recent allies, the U.S. and France.  A treaty later released all private claims for such seizures.  Congress was later persuaded, presumably by effective and well-paid lobbyists, to pass a law to pay the Mary’s owners' families (and other ship owners) for those “spoliation” losses.  Brooks’ position, he being an assignee of the claims of two descendants of the Mary’s part owner, prevailed at the Supreme Court.  In none of these cases was there any known Wilkinson involvement, but the history is fascinating.


The Blagge case was on appeal from several state Supreme Courts, one of them Massachusetts’.   Brooks v. Codman, 158 Mass. 477.  The lauded jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes was on the bench but did not have a part of Codman v. Brooks when it was back in Massachusetts courts, 167 Mass. 499 (1896), for resolution of other  disputes.   


But Holmes was the author in the later case of Hadlock v. Brooks, 178 Mass. 425 (1901), which reviewed the money verdict in a suit for unpaid legal fees against the administrator of the same disputed estate, yes, the same Mr. William Brooks.  The suit was brought by the widow of the lawyer (Hadlock) who Brooks had brought in as an associate in the Codman case.  Brooks refused to pay, asserting as his unsuccessful defense the rule against “champerty.”  I won’t go into that old concept. He lost and was ordered to pay.  A small win in a fight against inequality - amongst the upper classes.  But just wait….  


Before hiring Hadlock, Brooks’ associate in a senior counsel role was General Benjamin Butler.  I remembered that name but fuzzily - probably from The American Heritage magazines of my youth.  


Per Wikipedia, Butler was: a northern pro-slavery power lawyer, an anti-Semite and a war profiteer. His second son was named Ben-Israel. Butler was a poor-performing Union Army general and also the organizer of the first Black regiment in the Civil War.  He established the Union Army policy that said that escaped enslaved people were “contraband” with respect to the slaveholders and that therefore Union forces would never return them to slaveholders.  At the time, slavery was still legal in the southern states - there was still no federal law outlawing the practice.  The term contraband surely shows the persistence, even in the North, of the view of enslaved people as property.  Some say this policy dealing with the legal status of “freedmen” led to Lincoln’s war-time Emancipation Proclamation.


A relative on my mother’s side, part of a radical abolitionist Peacham, Vermont farm family,  taught Freedmen or “contrabands” in Freedmen Bureau Schools in the Gullah islands off Beaufort, S.C, throughout the Civil War.  She died there after the war.  Did she teach Justice Clarence Thomas’ ancestors?  


Butler was: a crook, a Congressman, and manager of the President Andrew Johnson impeachment process.  He authored the (anti-) Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and The Civil Rights Act of 1875, was a supporter of women’s suffrage and personally funded farm coops for formerly enslaved people. He was a Governor of Massachusetts and then candidate for President in 1884. Butler, when Governor, appointed the first African American and Irish American judges to the Massachusetts bench and the first woman (Clara Barton) to a state executive office. He was extremely wealthy, in part due to using his positions (including probably trading with the enemy while in charge of New Orleans during the Civil War) for personal gain. What a complicated man!  We see lawyers today working hard for inequality all day and contributing to equal justice at night - we should not be surprised to see such a mix 150 years ago.  Let's move on from Butler and back to Brooks.


A few years later, well before J. Edgar Wilkinson’s involvement, Mr. Brooks was again sued and lost his control of those same valuable claims concerning the loss of The Mary.  Brooks had taken over those claims by written assignment (contract) from two of his uncles. The two had been confined by their family in The Vermont Asylum for the Insane for almost fifty years, at least in part because it was the cheapest place to board them.  Brattleboro had no “poor farm'' until 1888 and kept it until 1951.  Poor farms for homeless people in Vermont were finally done away with by law in 1967.   I sometimes wonder if an enlightened version might be revived while making our way towards a better social support system for disadvantaged people in our country.  Weren’t the WPA and CCC equivalents during the Great Depression?


The brothers enjoyed unusual freedom for asylum residents and existed quite normally in the community, traveling to visit friends in Boston, for example.  


While Mr. Brooks’ family doctor thought they were sane after a 42 minute interview, the Court was not persuaded that they were competent to make the assignment of claims.  In large part because it was not thought reasonable that family members and the Asylum would confine them, but for their insanity.  The court cited the fact of their long semi-institutionalization without their objection and, finally, the contents of one brother’s diaries.[1] The real reason Brooks lost, in my view, was because he did not have them get independent legal advice, hid his activities from relatives and was dishonest about the assignments.[2]  Brooks v. Pratt, 118 F. 725 (1902).


The Asylum where the brothers lived, now called the Brattleboro Retreat, is a well-regarded private facility.  My father lived down the street from there in the late 1940s when he first moved to Vermont.   My family looked at The Retreat’s services when trying to help my brother to deal with his mental illness. No, this did not lead me to a fascinating career in trusts and estates - I did not know the story until 2022 and in fact I skipped that class in law school.  But I had some tussles with institutions and ran into other bad lawyers.




Jay Wilkinson
August 2024
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[1] “In these diaries there may be no entry, which, standing by itself, proclaims its writer insane, but it is probably true that almost any single written or spoken expression of a raving lunatic can be paralleled in some utterance of some man undoubtedly sane. It is not by a single expression that insanity is ordinarily to be detected. These diaries, both in respect of the language, the peculiar and unintelligible signs largely employed, and their general physical appearance, impress me with the strong belief that the writer was of unsound mind.” (from the District Court opinion.)


Jay says: “Careful with your creative writing, people.”


[2] “It is not thus that a counselor at law can be allowed to profit by a deed made in his favor by his client. The defendant’s intentions may have been good. He may have honestly believed that he had a right to act as he did; but his moral honesty will not, in a court of equity, justify his professional conduct.”