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In 1796, Eulalie Mandeville, a twenty-two-year-old femme de couleur libre, and Eugene Macarty, a twenty-eight-year-old blanco, began a relationship that would last almost fifty years, ending only with his death, and produce five children. Shortly after the relationship began, Mandeville received land and money from her family, “one of the most distinguished in Louisiana,” and used them to develop a dry-goods business. By her mid-thirties, she had become a wealthy and respected businesswoman. At first conducting her business in Macarty’s name, Mandeville increasingly made contracts in her own name after 1825 and was depositing large sums of money into her own bank account. A few weeks before he died, Macarty transferred more than 100,000 dollars into Mandeville’s account, leaving himself with an estate of about 12,000 dollars at his death on October 25, 1845, at the age of seventy-seven. Deprived of a substantial inheritance, Macarty’s collateral white heirs sued Mandeville, arguing that she was “illegally in possession” of Macarty’s estate, which they contended included real estate in New Orleans, several slaves, and additional cash that Mandeville claimed as her own personal property. They rested their case on the provision of Louisiana law that declared a concubine could not inherit more than 10 percent of her consort’s estate. Drawing on both her familial ties to the Marigny family and her connections within the New Orleans business community, Mandeville easily demonstrated to the satisfaction of both the Jefferson Parish Probate Court and the Louisiana Supreme Court that the property in question, including the money Macarty had transferred to her shortly before his death, “belongs exclusively to her, and has been honestly acquired, and is the result of her industry and economy during half a century.” In dismissing the plaintiffs’ suit against her, Chief Justice George Eustis concluded that, given the impossibility of legalizing her relationship with Macarty, she “had, in all respects, rendered her condition as reputable and as useful as it could be made.” In fact, their relationship c h a p t e r s e v e n CodificationofaTripartiteRacialSystem inAnglo-Louisiana Codification of a Tripartite Racial System 179 was, in Eustis’s words, “the nearest approach to marriage which the law recognized .”1 Beginning at the end of the Spanish era, Mandeville and Macarty’s relationship survived, even thrived, during the Anglo-American era. And despite being denied the privileges of legal marriage, Mandeville and Macarty and many other couples like them formed families that continued to be tolerated as they had been in the eighteenth century. Yet circumstances had changed in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, as the United States became the third and last government to take over the region that included New Orleans.2 Even before Louisiana became politically incorporated into the United States, changing economic conditions were bringing New Orleans’ plantation society more in line with those of the surrounding southern states. With the reopening of the slave trade in the late 1770s, Euro-Louisianan planters could finally, after eighty years, purchase as many slaves as they needed or could afford. They then redoubled their efforts to find a profitable crop for their slaves to produce; their answer came in 1795 when Étienne Boré successfully crystallized Louisiana’s local sugar cane. During the same time, liberalized Spanish immigration policies had encouraged Anglo-Americans to migrate into the lower Mississippi River Valley, bringing slaves and cotton cultivation with them. After a brief period of stagnation in the early 1790s, when tobacco and indigo prices declined, planters quickly converted their plantations to produce sugar and cotton on a large scale. By 1802, more than five thousand hogsheads of sugar and eighteen thousand bales of cotton were moving through the port of New Orleans; by 1810, these numbers had doubled.3 In addition to seeking to politically and economically incorporate New Orleans into the United States, Anglo-Americans who arrived after 1803 also sought to integrate the city into an Anglo-American racial hierarchy, one that radically differed from the order by then firmly entrenched there. As they attempted to transform the city’s racial system into a binary one that equated blackness with enslavement and whiteness with freedom, authorities in Anglo-Louisiana began to undermine the legal and social position of gens de couleur libre by restricting manumission, limiting immigration, criminalizing racially exogamous marriages, and constraining the capacity of Euro-Louisianan men...

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