Webster v. Heard

Citations

• 32 Tex. 685

Syllabus

<p>1—By the will of a testator a negro could not have been left part slave and partly a free person. She could not be sufficiently emancipated to capacitate her to take property by devise, and still be left so much a slave as to be disabled from dealing with it like other free persons exempt from disabilities not imputed to her,</p> <p>3—A negress having been emancipated by the last will and testament of her former owner, and that will having been probated and established by a court of competent jurisdiction, whose action in the premises has never been invalidated, her status as a free person is res adjudícala, and unless she was under a disability of infancy, lunacy, or the like, which is not pretended, neither her former master nor any court had the power to constitute a guardianship over her person or estate, and her conveyances of her property, duly executed, are to be dealt with in like manner as those of other free persons.</p>