After his death in 1846, Eugene Macarty’s white distant heirs sued Eulalie Mandeville, Eugene’s partner of fifty years and a free woman of color, for approximately $155,000 (five million today). This Louisiana civil suit, Macarty et al v. Mandeville, contains more than 350 pages of written testimony and evidence, involved the largest fortune held by a Black woman in antebellum America, and embodied several vexing issues of the day in the nineteenth century United States—from the moral and social implications of mixed-race relationships to the sanctity of property in a slave society. 

This talk will touch on these issues in passing, but its focus will be on Eulalie’s own documentary—and archival—strategies. Through intentional and interested processes, Eulalie herself shaped the documentary record. Therefore, by employing a close reading of this single lawsuit, it will suggest 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 co-production, reveals the myriad ways Black Americans collected, collated, preserved, and interacted with documents and therefore shaped the narratives the archives tell.