Eulalie de Mandéville

Eulalie de Mandéville also known as Cécée MacCarty (1774–1848) was an American businesswoman. She has been called the 'most successful free mulatto businesswoman' in the Antebellum South.

Eulalie de Mandeville was born in New Orleans, the daughter of Count Pierre Enguerrand Philippe, Écuyer de Mandéville, Sieur de Marigny, and Marie Jeannette, a woman he enslaved, who was originally from Congo. At her birth, Eulalie and her mother Jeannette were manumitted. Eulalie was raised in the household of Françoise Delille de Marigny, Pierre de Marigny's mother, and grew up alongside her half-siblings, including Bernard de Marigny. The courtship between Eulalie and Eugène de MacCarty, a member of a prominent French-Irish family in New Orleans, was overseen by her father and paternal grandmother The couple had five children between 1794 and 1815, Her import business distributed manufactured goods from New Orleans to retail outlets as far away as Attakapas. and she was listed among the wealthiest black entrepreneurs in the United States between 1820 and 1865. When he died, she inherited $12,000 from his estate. The relatives of her late husband—among them his brother Nicolas Theodore Macarty and Delphine LaLaurie—questioned his will, claiming that the only relatives of color who could inherit under the American Civil Code of 1825—enacted after the couple had entered into their formal relationship—were his children, and even then they could receive no more than 10% of a father's assets. Furthermore, the Macartys questioned whether the personal fortune of Eulalie de Marigny de Mandéville (at that time worth $3 million) should in fact be classified as part of the property of Eugene de MacCarty, claiming he had transferred much of his property to her prior to his death with the intent to defraud the legal heirs. Enoul Livaudais, Eulalie's uncle-by-marriage, and her half-brother Bernard de Marigny testified on her behalf in court, and the court found in favor of Eulalie, pointing out that the bulk of Eulalie's wealth had been acquired before her legal marriage to MacCarty. The Supreme Court of Louisiana ruled against the Macartys again in 1848, the year of Eulalie's death, writing that, "No doubt parental love, the strongest tie on earth, suggested to both of them that their own children were better entitled to inherit the proceeds of their labor than collateral heirs for whom they felt little or no regard.”