Miss Mary’s Money: Fortune and Misfortune in a North Carolina Plantation Family, 1760–1924 by H. G. Jones (review)

Miss Mary’s Money: Fortune and Misfortune in a North Carolina Plantation Family, 1760–1924 begins by describing the will of Mary Ruffin Smith, the never-married daughter of James Strudwick Smith and Delia Jones. Mary Smith died in November 1885, leaving a large amount of land to the University of North Carolina and to five former slaves of the family in her will. The complexities of the familial network are revealed to the reader when the author notes that that these former slaves “were also Mary Smith’s nieces,” who were “born to her enslaved servant Harriet and sired by the spinster’s brothers—Sidney, an attorney and state legislator, and Francis, a physician” (p. 1). This book by H. G. Jones, with David Southern, unravels the story of the two unmarried sons and spinster daughter, described as “[a] dysfunctional family, if there ever was one” (p. 3). The book also investigates the intricate ways that this family was linked to North Carolina’s history, in particular the state’s university and the town of Chapel Hill.

The first five chapters of the book provide a detailed account of the Jones-Smith family history, focusing on how the ruling patriarchs of this local dynasty rose to prominence but very nearly lost their fortune at the hands of a spendthrift father and wayward sons, only to be saved from financial and moral ruin by the daughter of the family, Mary. The remaining six chapters focus on the beneficiaries of Mary’s money after her death and the ensuing legal conflicts, petty squabbles, and meaningful silences resulting from the division of her estate and its value between the university and the Episcopal Church.

The extent of archival research in Miss Mary’s Money is particularly impressive. At times, however, it is unclear how the material relates to the overall arguments of the book, particularly in relation to the sources about the political lives of James Strudwick Smith and his sons. In addition, the reader is left with many unanswered questions. The tragic regression of Francis Smith into mental illness, for example, is never explored in its entirety, and there is no examination of how such conditions were treated in North Carolina itself or the wider antebellum South. As with previous works by H. G. Jones, this book remains wholly tied to North Carolina history. His focus on the local seems esoteric at times and detached from the wider context of the antebellum era. More significant is that while Jones perhaps intended for the book’s focus to be on Mary’s life experiences, it devotes much more space to her father and brothers, to eminent men of North Carolina such as Kemp Plummer Battle and Duncan Cameron, and to church authorities who decided where her money would go. Mary herself is barely visible, and as a consequence the book loses much of its initial promise.