Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines

Introduction: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines

Introduction The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines On the morning ofJanuary 10,1885, occupants of New Orleans breakfast tables put down their coffee and beignets, picked up their copies of the Daily Picayune, and read the obituary of Myra Clark Gaines. For years her wizened figure had been a familiar sight to residents of the Crescent City, always dressed in black silk, a black bonnet on her head with improbably red curls peeping from underneath its brim. The two-column, front-page notice chronicled a life spent in the "shadow of the law." Gaines had challenged the entrenched interests of the New Orleans business community, tied up land titles for more than fifty years, and threatened to bankrupt the city—becoming, in the process, a national celebrity as well as the most notorious and most hated woman in New Orleans.1 The lawsuit begun by Myra Clark Gaines in 1834 had all the trappings of classic melodrama—a lost heir, a missing will, an illicit relationship, a questionable marriage, a misplaced trust, and a murder. Lasting over half a century, this struggle by the daughter of Daniel Clark and Zulime Carriere to prove her legitimacy and justify her claim to her father's enormous i. "Death of Mrs. Myra Clark Gaines," New Orleans Daily Picayune,Jan. 10, 1885, p. i; Anna Clyde Plunkett, Corridors by Candlelight: A Family Album with Words (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1949), 155. The metaphor of the law's "shadow" represents Alexis de Tocqueville's insight into the authority given to "the courts of justice by the general opinion" of Americans. Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Knopf, 1948), i: 151-1. Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon: The D'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), also employs Tocqueville's metaphor. i Notorious Woman fortune excited the interest of the nineteenth-century public, providing fodder for gossips and employment for lawyers. Today, the records of the longest continuous litigation in the history of the United States court system lie moldering in courthouses and libraries, unexamined for more than fifty years.2 Few modern lawyers have even heard of the famous lawsuit, but no nineteenth-century attorney could escape knowledge of the Gaines cases. Between 1834 and 1891 the Gaines litigation wound a tortuous path through the American legal system. At one time or another most of the distinguished members of the nineteenth-century American bar participated in the case as attorneys for either Myra Clark Gaines or her adversaries . Such legal luminaries as ReverdyJohnson, Caleb Gushing, Francis Scott Key, Jeremiah Black, and Daniel Webster left their mark on the case. On its main issues the lawsuit came before the United States Supreme Court ten times and before the Supreme Court of Louisiana twice. Counting appeals on collateral issues, the United States Supreme Court heard the Gaines case seventeen times and the Louisiana Court heard it five times. Besides its appearances in these upper chambers, the main lawsuits, or cases arising from them, occupied the probate or district courts of Louisiana and the district or circuit courts of the United States in New Orleans at least seventy times. At almost any moment during thefifty-seven-year lifetime of the litigation, a Gaines lawsuit was pending in one of these many courts. In 1861 Justice James Wayne of the United States Supreme Court, announcing what he hoped and expected to be a final decision, 2. The records of the New Orleans DistrictCourts for the United States and the State of Louisiana that heard the various Gaines cases have been transferred to the National Archives, SouthwestRegion, in Fort Worth, Texas. During the 19405, Nolan J. Harmon published The Famous Case of Myra Clark Gaines (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1946); Harnett Kane wrote a novel, New Orleans Woman (Garden City, N.J.: Sun Dial Press, 1948), based on the case; and Anna Clyde Plunkett published Corridors by Candlelight(1949), a memoir of her father Franklin Perin, one of Gaines'sattorneys. These books are the most recent printed material on Myra Clark Gaines. Records of the Gaines case appear in the archives of the Louisiana state court system, the United States federal courts,and the Confederate courts. Louisiana lower courtsthat heard the case include the court of probates, the Orleans Parish Court, the First Judicial District Court, the Second District Court (a continuationafter 1853 of the court of probates ), and the Third District Court. Records of all these courts...