2023 Theses Bachelor's

The Color of Intimacy: Marriage, Passing, and the Legal Strategies of Afro-Creole Women in Antebellum New Orleans

Foretia, Crystal

For my thesis, I will investigate the lives of two free Afro-Creole women who engaged in intimate partnerships with white men in New Orleans from the late 18th century into the 19th century. These women are Marianne Celeste Dragon (1777-1856) and Modeste Foucher (c. 1775-1853). Celeste Dragon was a litigious woman of French-Canadian, Greek, and African ancestry and best known for “successfully” passing as white prior to marrying her white partner. Foucher was a mixed-race entrepreneur and the life partner of Barthélemy Lafon, a reputed architect. By examining their interracial unions and plaçage as a historiographical concept, I will elucidate how racial barriers to marriage undermined equal access to citizenship. Beyond providing legal recognition to an intimate relationship, marriage functions as a civil, social, and ultimately political institution. Through marriage, other legal rights and norms are practiced, which include inheritances for legitimate children, transfer of estates upon a spouse’s death, and access to widow(er)’s benefits. However, numerous hardships emerged for free Afro-descendant women in interracial unions, such as: white men abandoning their mixed-race partners for white women, mixed-race children being legally illegitimate, and lawsuits over inheritances. By analyzing Celeste Dragon’s and Foucher’s experiences with family formation, racial identity, and litigation, I argue that they navigated ever-changing social and legal hierarchies in New Orleans with constrained agency. That agency renders the label of “placée” inapplicable to both Afro-Creole women. Yet they have been marginalized in histories of Pre-Civil War Louisiana due to scholars studying them solely in relation to the men to whom they were attached.

Keywords: New Orleans, free people of color, interracial marriage, courtroom, property rights, 18th century, 19th century, gender, whiteness, colonialism, creole, passing