Evander McIver Law, died October 31, 1920

Evander McIver Law was active in Confederate veterans' activities and commanded the Florida Division, helped to organize a United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Bartow, and wrote several articles about the war.

On May 28, 1890, Law gave a speech titled "The Confederate Revolution" to the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia at the meeting held in Richmond.  He gave a history and reasoning for the South seceding from the Union, then a brief history of the war. Finally, he discussed the war's aftermath, honored the Confederate leadership and paid tribute to the ordinary privates that served in the Confederate armies.

In his speech, he said "It is true that the Federal government overthrew secession...but has it relieved it from the danger of revolution and internal dissension in other forms and from other causes?" Law maintained that the "vast accumulation of wealth" to so few people might cause the United States problems in its future. He believed that giving so much power to so few was the biggest reason for corruption and decay within our nation. 

An interview around the turn of the century said that

General Law considers the most important questions demanding the attention of our people to be the race problem, the liquor question, and that great and vital problem, the necessity for an honest and just government.

A man of pronounced opinions and strong convictions he does not hesitate to declare himself in favor of lynching for certain crimes. 

Though he has passed the three score and ten mark, he is yet active in the discharge of his daily duties, and by a life of fidelity to every trust has won the esteem of a constituency which extends from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.

He died in Bartow on October 31, 1920, at the age of 84.  

On November 1st, 1920, in the New York Times obituary section, General E.M. Law was
listed as having past away after a week’s illness. Law was the last surviving general of the Army of the Confederacy. 

His funeral was held on November 12; all shops were closed and the entire town was in attendance.  He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery next to his wife, who died the same year.

After his death, the town of Bartow inducted him into the Bartow Hall of Fame to “recognize his significant service to our community, state, and nation,” insuring “the continuation of his influence among our people.” There is a monument to him in Bartow. 

Law Monument in Bartow, Florida

At Gettysburg, the Alabama State Monument stands where Law’s brigade began its attack towards Little Round Top.

Alabama State Monument, Gettysburg 

In 2004, plans by a Law relative to auction papers from the general were disrupted by the State of South Carolina, which moved to seize the documents.  South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster served a temporary restraining order on August 6, against an auction house in Columbia, the day before Thomas Law Willcox was scheduled to sell off 444 documents handed down from his great-great-uncle, Evander McIver Law.  Willcox , in his late 60s, a retired businessman and building contractor living at Seabrook Island south of Charleston, had maintained anonymity prior to the auction. But within days he revealed his identity, filing for bankruptcy in federal court.

Willcox found the papers in 1999 or 2000 in a shopping bag in a closet at his late stepmother’s home.  He had the papers appraised at $2.5 million, according to his attorney, Kenneth Krawchek. He approached "several libraries and state institutions" in attempt to sell them as a collection, but without success. Eventually, "financial and health problems forced him into auction."

McMaster asserted that the papers belong to South Carolina because they were among the official documents that the governor ordered spirited out of Columbia in February 1865 in advance of the Union army under Gen. William T. Sherman.

According to the attorney general's office, on February 16, 1865, as Sherman's army threatened the capital at Columbia, the state's official papers were placed on a train and sent out of the city. The papers got as far as Chester, about 45 miles north, where they were sitting on rail cars when Columbia burned the following day.  By late 1865, nearly all the papers had made their way back into state keeping in Columbia. How and why Law came to possess the 444 documents, no one can explain.

On February 16, 1896, General Law wrote a letter to a New York book dealer regarding the sale of some letters which agree, appear to belong to the collection at issue. In1896 General Law apparently sold a portion of the papers which were subsequently purchased by the Library of Congress in 1903.  By the 1940s, Mrs. Annie J. Storm, the granddaughter of General Law, was in possession of the papers and attempted to sell them to both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina. Mrs. Storm described the documents as "original State House papers entrusted to [her] grandfather at the time of the surrender." No sale resulted, but the papers were placed on microfilm at the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. 

"The State of South Carolina is not contending that the Law family did anything illegal," said Trey Walker, a spokesman for McMaster. "But these letters are just as much part of the [state] archives, and just as much state property, as if they were taken out of the governor's office today."Krawchek, suggested that the state will have a hard time making its case.  "The state maintains that these are public records, but we don't even know if that's true," Krawchek said. And even if it is determined that they are public records, he said, "Were they abandoned? Or given away? We don't know that. Everybody at the time thought that General Law was the right one to keep these." He said Willcox's father received the collection from his aunt, Blanche Law, Evander McIver Law's granddaughter.State Archivist Rodger Stroup alerted the attorney general's office to the planned auction.
"I personally haven't looked at them that closely," said Stroup, who is director of the South Carolina Department. of Archives and History. "My staff realized that these constituted a body of records of the government," and that therefore, by state law, they belonged to South Carolina.  "They're the official papers of the governors during the war," Stroup said, "and they reflect the thinking of the government, and military information. We'd like to have the originals back."

Krawchek, meanwhile, said, "Collectors should be nervous" over the state's contention that, despite the passage of nearly 140 years, "once it's a government document, it's always a government document."

Wilcox's sister and another family member sued him for a share of the proceeds. The state of South Carolina successfully sued for ownership in Federal Bankruptcy Court, but that August 15, 2005, decision was overturned by the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston Division, on January 12, 2006. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, upheld the district court decision on October 27, 2006, and the United States Supreme Court subsequently refused to hear the case. 

The papers in the possession of Willcox were auctioned as separate lots at Bill Mishoe's Auction House on September 29, 2007. They realized a little over $330,000. By order of the Bankruptcy Court after deduction of the auction house commission, one-third of the proceeds was to go to Willcox's attorney and the remainder was to be equally divided between Wilcox for one part and the sister and other family member for the other.