Righting the past: Euphrozine Hinard, enslaver and emancipator, dead at 90

​​Editor’s note: This is the 20th in a series of historical obituaries written today to honor the men and women of the past who were denied the honor at the time of their death because of discrimination due to their race and/or gender.

Euphrozine Hinard, Escambia County’s largest enslaver of color who later manumitted at least a dozen people before the Civil War, died in New Orleans on Jan. 2, 1866. She was 90 years old.

Ms. Hinard had a complicated relationship with slavery. Baptismal records suggest she was born into slavery. Later, she bought, sold and manumitted enslaved people in New Orleans, Mobile and Pensacola. By 1830, she had the distinction of being the free person of color who enslaved the most people – 12 – in Escambia County and the second most in Florida.

Euphrozine Hinard was born in New Orleans on Dec. 15, 1775 and baptized six days later in St. Louis Cathedral. Along with her mother, María or Marianne Grondel, Euphrozine was manumitted soon thereafter. Her father, Francisco Hisnard (or Hinard), was a white merchant.

The second of three daughters, Euphrozine grew up in a family that became prosperous, in part, from enslaved labor. By the 1790s, records show her mother selling enslaved people. Around the age of 16, Euphrozine began cohabitating with a recently arrived colonial official, 50-year-old Nicholas Vidal. Neither concubinage nor common-law marriage, theirs was a relatively common relationship in 1790s New Orleans. Euphrozine gave birth to their first child, Carolina, a year after they met. A second daughter, Mercedes, came two years after that. A son, Nicholas, died a week after he was born.

Righting the Past: Mercedes Vidal, center of early territorial scandal, dead at 84

The family thrived in New Orleans. Their home became a gathering place that welcomed colonial officials and the city’s Creole community. Nicholas served the colonial governor as a trusted legal advisor and lieutenant governor. A contemporary described Euphrozine as “an important channel through whom all favors flowed.”

Before leaving New Orleans for the new capital of Pensacola, Nicholas Vidal officially acknowledged Carolina and Mercedes as “his natural heiresses.” With her daughters’ future seemingly assured, Euphrozine moved to the backwater garrison town on Pensacola Bay. She would have another child, Joaquina, in Pensacola.

Then tragedy struck. On May 25, 1806, Nicholas Vidal died. In the battle over his estate, Euphrozine faced off against Pensacola’s most influential businessman, John Forbes. After four years of litigation, Euphrozine received her portion of the estate: $1,379. It would take another decade before an American court awarded her daughters their inheritance.

In the meantime, Euphrozine formed a relationship with Juan Dominguez, a Spanish military leader decades her senior. Their first child, Vincente, came in 1810. Two more would soon follow.

Euphrozine invested in real estate, including property that would come to be known as the Dorothy Walton House. She alsooperated a successful shop that sold handkerchiefs, satin and “fancy French calico.” When Andrew Jackson invaded Pensacola in 1814, Euphrozine claimed his troops raided her home and confiscated thousands of dollars of goods, including gold necklaces, earrings, rings, sundry fabrics and over $3,500 in silver, specie and banknotes.

By the time Pensacola became an American territory, Euphrozine Hinard had become an established property owner, enslaver and businesswoman. A savvy investor, Hinard responded to Pensacola’s late 1820s economic boom by purchasing two women, two men and a child on credit. Her goal was likely to hire them out to employers in the city’s desperate labor market, possibly with the tacit understanding that they could one day purchase their freedom. Nearly 20 years later, they started buying that freedom.

In the 1840s, Euphrozine began freeing rather than buying people. She started with the children of a woman she enslaved named Juliana. On Sept. 30, 1846, Euphrozine manumitted 11-month-old Mary Louisa in exchange for $100 paid by the infant’s godmother. Two years later, she manumitted Juliana’s unborn child for $25. Over the next fourteen years, Euphrozine would “liberate and set free” at least 10 more people, the last in March 1862 when Confederate troops still occupied Pensacola. Some, however, were not able to purchase their – or their children’s – freedom. Euphrozine sold four people, including two girls, ages two and eleven, during this same time period.

Euphrozine left no record explaining why she began manumitting. It may have reflected her changing financial situation, a logical response to a lingering economic downturn. It may have reflected new ideological, religious or moral convictions spurred by Florida’s increasingly aggressive anti-Black legislation. Maybe it was awareness of the growing national abolitionist movement that was then focused on Pensacola and its notorious treatment of Captain Jonathan Walker, a White abolitionist. Maybe it was always her plan to let the people she enslaved purchase their freedom. Whatever her motives, Euphrozine is today recognized for the pathway to freedom she opened.

As the nation careened toward civil war, Florida imposed increasingly stringent anti-Black legislation, including an 1856 law requiring free people of color like Euphrozine to have a white “guardian.” Many free Blacks in Pensacola left. Dozens emigrated to Mexico. Euphrozine stayed. Under the benign guardianship of her neighbor Zeon Souchet, she continued manumitting into the first year of the Civil War. And willing Pensacola officials continued to process these essentially illegal manumissions as they had for decades.

Euphrozine Hinard died in New Orleans four weeks after the ratification of the 13th Amendment finally abolished chattel slavery, except as criminal punishment. Her daughter, Marianna Dominguez, served asexecutorof her $2,000 Pensacola estate. Zeon Souchet and Joseph Wyer helped Marianna post the bond needed to administer her mother’s estate.

Born into slavery, Euphrozine later profited from enslaved labor. Yet she also bucked law and custom to free at least a dozen of the people she enslaved, including Joseph Wyer. Wyer would go on to hold multiple elected offices, including Pensacola tax collector and Escambia County commissioner. His is but one of the lives and legacies that Euphrozine affected. In the stories passed down to generations of Pensacolians, Euphrozine Hinard has been kindly remembered as a successful businesswoman and a complicated champion of freedom.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Euphrozine Hinard, enslaver and emancipator, dead at 90