The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans

After Eugene Macarty's death in 1846, his white distant heirs sued Eulalie Mandeville, Eugene's partner of fifty years and a free woman of color, for approximately $155,000. This article follows the trial that ensued, Macarty et al. v. Mandeville, a Louisiana civil suit that lasted two years, spanned more than 350 pages of written testimony and evidence, involved some of New Orleans's leading families, and concerned one of the largest fortunes held by a free Black woman in antebellum America. By employing a close reading of a single lawsuit, this article shows that trial court records function as a form of archives in themselves and Black Americans both used and produced those archives. Reading a trial record as an archive, that is, for its very intentionality, careful and selective curation, and coproduction, reveals the myriad ways Black Americans collected, collated, preserved, and interacted with documents and therefore shaped the narratives the archives tell.