Black Women, Free Soil Suits, and the Civil Law

In the 1830s to 1850s, nearly twenty women and girls successfully sued for their freedom in New Orleans on the basis of having touched the free soil of France. This is surprising because New Orleans was then the epicenter of the American slave trade. Previous literature identified these cases, but did not put them in Atlantic perspective. Through the lens of one particularly well-documented case, this paper asks what enslaved American women and girls experienced in France that emboldened them to sue for freedom upon return to New Orleans. After tracing Mary Guesnard’s itinerary from New Orleans to Paris, this paper reconstructs her lived experience there. To say that American slaves lived as if free in France would be an exaggeration. Domestic labor involved grueling hours and left women vulnerable to domestic abuse. But perhaps for the first time in their lives, women like Mary had an opportunity to think of themselves as not necessarily unfree. Like eleven other would-be litigants, Mary entered France during the July Monarchy, a period of hope for people of color in metropolitan France, culminating in Abolition in 1848. Not only did Mary reside in the home of a Parisian barrister, but she also would have witnessed the successful freedom petitions of thirty-seven women and girls in France’s highest appellate court in 1847. As in the later Louisiana cases, most petitioners were women and girls suing their female mistresses. Once back in New Orleans, Mary transformed raw desires into legal claims. Her gender, along with her connections to a propertied Francophone community of free people of color, helps explains why and how she was able to access legal representation. In sum, appreciating the afterlives of a French Atlantic world deepens and challenges current knowledge on both local Louisiana history and the history of American slavery.