The case concerned the will of John J Saylor, of Lexington district, South Carolina, who died in 1835. In the will he provided for the de facto emancipation of six favoured slaves and made provisions in their favour; the major bequests Saylor made were contingent on the beneficiaries working towards the achievement of his main object, the emancipation. If the any of the beneficiaries, Saylor's two sisters and brother and their children, proved opposed to the attempted emancipation or neglected, in the opinion of Saylor's trustees, to do enough to bring it about, then their share or shares were to go to the Lutheran church in South Carolina or to the schools commissioners of Lexington. The will imposed certain duties on the trustees in relation to the management of property for the benefit of the six slaves which the trustees deemed so troublesome that they declined to act. Samuel D Corbin, the husband of Saylor's sister Marcella C Corbin, was appointed to carry out the provisions of the will and in the courts of South Carolina achieved a division of the property between the legatees, intended to be final, in January 1840. This division, however, took place during the lives of the testator's sisters, and not, as he had intended, after their deaths. The slaves were sold; some were bought by Samuel Corbin and brought to Georgia, where they remained with him and his executor (Corbin having died in 1862) until they were emancipated in 1865. Corbin's brother, Henry L Corbin, qualified as executor and, in the face of various creditors of the estate, took the will to court. The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the lower court, though Justice Harris dissented.
