South Carolina Archives
Series Description

Plats (Commissioners of Forfeited Estates)

CREATOR: Comptroller General. Commissioners of Forfeited Estates.

TITLE: Plats

DATE: 1782-1785

VOLUME: 0.66 cubic ft.

ARRANGEMENT: Series arranged in rough alphabetical order by owner of the forfeited estate in two sequences, one regular sized and one oversized. Arbitrary numbers have been assigned for the purpose of indexing.

BIOGRAPHICAL/HISTORICAL NOTE: South Carolina confiscated the real and personal property of 237 loyalists by an act of its General Assembly in 1782. S.C. Statute 1782(4)516, a bill of attainder, provided for commissioners who were to sell the property and turn the proceeds over to the state treasury. Some of the confiscated slaves were to serve as bounties for enlistment in the state's Continental Line, but slave families were not to be broken up. Others were to work for the state.

Six lists of persons were appended to the act but were printed separately in the Statutes at Large (S.C. Statute 1782(6)629). List one was comprised of largely non-resident British subjects and list six of "inveterate enemies." Persons on lists two through five, those congratulating General Henry Clinton, petitioners for service in the royal militia, those congratulating General Charles Cornwallis, and current holders of British commissions, were to be banished as well as lose their property. Many of the persons listed in the Confiscation Act later had their property restored (but subject to amercement) under the terms of subsequent acts. If the property had already been sold, the persons buying the property retained it but the proceeds of the sale, which may have been in indents, were turned over to the former owners.

SUMMARY SCOPE NOTE: This series consists of plats for lands confiscated from loyalists under the 1782 act. The series also includes a small number of indentures related to the purchase of confiscated land. Plats are scale drawings of land and include names of the owners; acreage; boundaries; boundary markers; natural features; improvements, if any; the names of surrounding landowners; and the names of the deputy surveyors who did the surveys. Creeks, roads, branches, swamps, and the like are also named. The plats are of two types. Most of them state that they were made at the direction of the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates. In other cases copies of plats already on file in the surveyor general's office were used and certified as true copies by the surveyor general. Large holdings were often subdivided into numbered tracts and separate detailed plats for those numbered tracts are sometimes present. This series is incomplete.

INDEX/FINDING AID: All personal names, except those of surveyor generals, and all geographic features are included in the repository's On-line Combined Index to Multiple Record Series, 1675-1929. Plantation and barony names were indexed as topics, not as geographic locations.

ADDITIONAL FORM: None

GENERAL NOTE: Ovesized plats boxed with S126101, Papers relating to Claims on Estates (oversized), Box 5.

HIERARCHICAL NOTE:  Forms part of the records of the Comptroller General.