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1850 Louisiana Letter Concerning a Free Boy of Color's Claim Against His Tutor's Estate with Family Letter Reporting the Death from Cholera of an Enslaved Woman Named Mélité

1850 · réf. BK0112 — Natchitoches and New Orleans Louisiana 1850. Autograph letter signed by Michael Boyce to R. P. Gaillard Natchitoches October 25 1850 with a subsequent letter in French from Jules Gaillard to his father New Orleans November 7 1850 written on the same sheet. 9 ¾ x 8 inches. Three written pages on a single folded sheet. Old folds scattered staining and wear some losses and tears along edges affecting portions of text slight dampstaining at margins but generally legible good to very good overall. Two letters offering a look into the contrast between the legal status of free people of color and the lives of enslaved people in antebellum Louisiana. Writing from Natchitoches Michael Boyce reports to R. P. Gaillard on financial and succession matters including the deeply indebted estate of a deceased man who had served as tutor essentially a guardian to a free Black minor. Boyce explains that the succession was being administered "at the instance of a free Boy of color whose Tutor the dec'd became in 1835; or thereabouts." The deceased tutor had apparently dissipated money belonging to his ward leaving the boy with a claim against the estate. Boyce himself a judgment creditor recognizes that his own prospects for recovery are poor: "the free Boy of color whose Tutor he was must be paid first and there are a prodigious other judgments before mine so that I will never get anything. Indeed the Succession will not pay the sum he spent of the free Boy while Tutor he was." A tutor charged with administering a minor's property was accountable to his ward with the minor enjoying legal protections against the tutor's estate. Boyce recognizes the free boy's claim as taking precedence over those of numerous other creditors. On the same sheet Jules Gaillard writes from New Orleans to his father less than two weeks later. His French-language letter begins with news of the family's sugar crop-"les cannes continuent à rendre selon tes désirs" with Gaillard hoping for rain so that plantation operations can continue-and proceeds through family illnesses and travel plans before recording the death of an enslaved woman: "Ma tante Mme Gaillard a perdue sa mulâtresse Mélité du choléra. Il y a huit jours." The brief notice preserves both the name and approximate date and cause of death of Mélité an enslaved mixed-race woman in the Gaillard household who died during one of the recurrent cholera epidemics that devastated New Orleans and southern Louisiana at the midcentury. Boyce was a substantial enslaver-a history of Natchitoches Parish lists him as owning 84 enslaved people in 18621-making his discussion of the free Black ward's legally privileged claim especially illustrative of the complicated coexistence of enslavement free Black property ownership and Louisiana civil law. An interesting piece of antebellum Louisiana correspondence documenting free Black property rights enslavement sugar cultivation and the human toll of the 1850 cholera epidemic. 1 Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northwest Louisiana The Southern Publishing Company 1890 297. . unknown books