Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines

Preface

Preface On the second floor of the New Orleans Cabildo—an old government building now serving as a museum—stands a bust of a woman with a small card identifying her as "Myra Clark Gaines, plaintiff in more than three hundred lawsuits in the nineteenth century." No other memorial recognizes the woman who was once called the "scandal of New Orleans." No street in the city is named for her; no marker in the federal courthouse mentions her name. Yet for most of the century, residents of the Crescent City as well as citizens across the United States knew her as the heroine of the era's longest legal melodrama. The appeal of the Gaines case lies in the mystery surrounding Myra Gaines's claim to be the heir to a fortune in New Orleans real estate. Was she the legitimate daughter of a prominent New Orleans merchant, or was she the "fruit of an adulterous union," as her opponents believed? The paucity of objective evidence for or against Gaines's birthright meant that the trial judges based their decisions on testimony from witnesses whose memory of events long past was often contradictory. As I read through the pages of depositions I found myself sympathizing with Justice Robert Grier, who resented the need to decide a case "established by the dim recollections , imaginations, or inventions of anile gossips!" Both Gaines and her opponents used the opposing testimony to construct courtroom narratives that would convince judges, juries, and spectators of the so-called truth of their versions, and more than one hundred years after her death, New Orleans citizens can still engage in heated arguments over the veracity of Gaines's claims. I have tried to present the case as it developed xii Preface through its litigation, graduallyunfoldingtestimony and evidence to allow the reader to arrive at his or her own evaluation of Gaines's claims. My goal is to unravel the strands of Myra Gaines's story and place her struggle in the context of the development of family law during the nineteenth century. Historian David Hackett Fischer has described a literary technique he calls a "braided narrative," which intertwines elements of social history with a narrative of events. Michael Grossberg's A Judgment for Solomon: The D'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America, which demonstrates the use of this technique in legal history, served as a model for my treatment of Gaines's story. In retelling her tale, I have tried to weave together an account of the emergence of domestic relations law, the popularity of sentimental fiction, and the transformation of judicial attitudes toward women with the twists and turns of the litigation that made Gaines famous. The result is, to borrow the favorite label of contemporary newspaper accounts, a "true-life romance" that has fascinated me as much as it enthralled the public and frustrated its lawyers over a century ago. Legal scholars have paid very little attention to the Gaines proceedings; few modern lawyers outside of New Orleans are familiar with the case once termed "the most interesting . . . in the history of jurisprudence." The last published material appeared in the late 19405, and no more recent mention of Myra Gaines appears outside of biographical dictionaries. I began my search in the records of the seventeen appearances of the Gaines case before the United States Supreme Court, records that reprinted much of the testimony and outlined the basis of the case. Other records are located in several repositories. The circuit court in New Orleans published three compilations of testimony and briefs for the Gaines case, in 1858, 1877, and 1883. The eight-volume 1883 record is the most extensive, but even its documentation is not complete. Myra Gaines ultimatelyfiledmore than eighty suits in the United States courts in Louisiana and more than two hundred in the Confederate courts during the period of Confederate control of New Orleans. In the 19305, copies of many of the records from the Louisiana Court of Probates and the First Judicial District Court at New Orleans, as well as the original records from the United States Circuit Court and the Confederate courts, were removed to the National Archives , Southwest Region, in Fort Worth, Texas. Without the patient help of Fort Worth archivists Barbara Rust and Meg Hacker and their staff, this book would not exist. Several problems arose as I began to write. The Gaines case created a [3.140.188.16] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 09:01 GMT...