A marathon project is under way in New Orleans to digitize thousands of time-worn 18th-century French and Spanish legal papers that historians say give the first historical accounts of slaves and free blacks in North America.
Yellowed page by yellowed page, archivists are scanning the 220,000 manuscript pages from the French Superior Council and Spanish Judiciary between 1714 and 1803 in an effort to digitize, preserve, translate and index Louisiana's colonial past and in the process help re-write American history.
"No single historian could ever live long enough to write all the books that are to be written from all these documents," said Emily Clark, a Tulane University historian who has worked in the papers.
The few historians who've pored over the unique archive say it's pivotal because it connects early America to the broader history of the Atlantic slave trade. It's at the heart of a wave of research tracing American roots beyond the English colonies and into Spain, France and Africa.
"We don't think of American society simply built from east to west, but we think of it as built from south to north," said Ira Berlin, a University of Maryland historian. "As you begin to think of a different kind of history, you're naturally looking for new kinds of sources to write that history."
This massive trove mostly describes domestic life as found in civil court papers, because the colony's administrative records were taken back to Europe when the United States took possession of Louisiana in 1803.
So they tell of shipwrecks and pirates, of thieves and murderers, of gambling debts and slave sales, of real estate deals and wills. One finds pages signed by historical figures like Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, better known as Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, and Louis XVI, the king of France. And the bizarre, as in the case of a man accused of selling dog meat to Charity Hospital.
Inside the Old United States Mint museum, where the archive is stored, the pace of work is slow and methodical. The digitization team now consists of one full time staffer and one part-timer. The Louisiana State Museum, which cares for the archive, hopes to add more staff and finish the project within three years. At the current pace, it will take more than 10 years to finish.
Melissa Stein, the full-time staffer, looks for intriguing cases, like one about exhuming the body of an unbaptized 13-year-old slave girl, baptizing her and moving her body into the cemetery.
"It's a very short document, and really, really faded," she said, studying the fragment. She slipped it back into its folder. "It was a rough life here, that's for sure."
In colonial Louisiana, unlike the English colonies, African slaves and free blacks were allowed to testify in person in court.
"The Roman legal code recognized the personhood of an enslaved person and English common law didn't," Clark said. "So the kinds of things we can find out about the experiences of enslaved people from our records in Louisiana do not exist in the records of the 13 colonies."
Sophie White, a University of Notre Dame historian very familiar with the collection, said the testimony "opens up so much more about what as historians we can say about daily life."
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