Fellows’ Forum - An American Aristocracy: Race, Wealth, and the Fading Fortunes of Eulalie Mandeville and Bernard Soulié

In early nineteenth-century New Orleans, a Black aristocracy emerged in the teeth of slavery. These aristocrats accumulated astonishing wealth, engaged in trade with whites, entered long distance credit relationships with counterparties as influential as the Rothschilds, and built American fortunes. But to acquire a fortune was one thing; to pass it to one’s children, in the age of slavery and eventual Jim Crow, would be another.

This talk will follow the lives of two wealthy and sophisticated free Black financiers who built their fortunes in New Orleans and traces their histories as they moved their wealth abroad, to Cuba and to France. The main characters, Eulalie Mandeville and Bernard Soulié, were two of the wealthiest and best-connected Black Americans in the United States, but their remarkable stories remain untold. Yet in recovering them, a lost chapter of American history is revealed: a story of cunning entrepreneurs, with a gambler’s eye for the risks that came with being both wealthy and Black in a discriminatory world. It also follows the stories of their descendants, as they struggled to replicate the success of their parents. Wealthy beyond imagination, they sought to create dynasties that might rival Vanderbilts or Carnegies; yet their status was always precarious and would remain so as American racial categories and discriminatory laws followed them across the Atlantic.

All Welcome