"Melissa Daggetts Eugène and Eulalie: A Family Saga of Love, Race, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans is an epic story of love, race, and ethnicity. It chronicles the lives of Eulalie Mandeville, a free woman of color, and her white partner, Eugène Macarty. Mandeville and Macarty, both descendants of elite colonial families, began an interracial relationship in the 1790s that endured for more than half a century and produced five children. It also led to Mandevilles phenomenal rise to the pinnacle of wealth and success within the unique tripartite racial structure of nineteenth-century New Orleans. Daggett uses the voluminous Nicolas Théodore Macarty et al v. Eulalie Mandeville f.w.c.

(1848) court case to examine how an interracial relationship endured over fifty years despite onerous laws during the Spanish regime and the antebellum era that complicated such partnerships. She examines the history of the Macarty and Mandeville families, revealing how they paralleled each other in Louisiana history and often intersected on familial, social, military, economic, and political levels. Daggett also analyzes the struggles of the free people of color in both colonial Louisiana and early America and explores the ways slavery, manumission, and inheritance laws connected to the two families. Her work complements the historiography of the free people of color in New Orleans, which has evolved in the last two decades from a macrohistorical approach focused on analyzing group data to a microhistorical narrative focused on individuals and their social, legal, and economic battles. The intriguing tale of Eugène Macarty and Eulalie Mandeville has languished for generations in the shadows of historical obscurity. Daggetts study is the first to examine it comprehensively and will surely interest historians and general readers"-- Provided by publisher.