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

​Editor’s note: This is the eleventh 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.

Mercedes “Merced” Vidal, formerly of Pensacola, died of a stroke in July 1879 in the place of her birth, New Orleans, Louisiana. She was 84. As a young woman, Ms. Vidal gained renown for successfully defending her family’s inheritance in the early days of territorial Florida.

Born Maria Josepha de las Mercedes Hinard on Jan. 10, 1795, Ms. Hinard embodied two distinct heritages. Her mother, Euphrozine Hinard, was a free woman of color born and raised in New Orleans. Her father, Nicholas Vidal, was born in Cartagena, a port city in present-day Colombia. He served as a prominent Spanish official. Euphrozine gave birth to their first daughter, Carolina Maria Salome Hinard, in 1792 when she was 16. Nicholas was 52. Three years later, Hinard had her second daughter, Mercedes, baptized in the new St. Louis Cathedral in the heart of what is today called the French Quarter.

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Mercedes grew up in comfort and community. She ate off fine china. Portraits of Napoleon and George Washington hung on the walls. On “festival days,” her “doorstep was a gathering place.” Her father led the colony, serving as a trusted legal advisor, lieutenant governor, and, for two years, interim governor of Louisiana. Mercedes also saw her mother steadily gain political influence, becoming, by one account, “an important channel [to Vidal] through whom all favors flowed.” In 1798, Nicholas Vidal officially claimed Mercedes and Carolina as “his natural heiresses.”

Global politics upended Mercedes’s world in 1803. The transfer of New Orleans to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase forced Vidal, Hinard and their two young daughters to uproot to Pensacola, the capital of Spanish West Florida. Merced was just settling into life with her new brother, Joaquina, when their father died unexpectedly on May 25, 1806. Father James Coleman officiated Vidal’s lavish funeral at the makeshift waterfront church in the Gaelic lilt of his native Ireland.

Nicholas Vidal left a substantial estate and many debts. Vidal and Hinard never married, so their daughters were supposed to be the estate’s principal benefactors. But powerful interests intervened. Assigned a guardian against their mother’s wishes, Mercedes and Carolina fought back, successfully challenging the“fraudulent”sale of their father’s land in Baton Rouge. Eventually, the estate’s creditors, including Euphrozine Hinard, were paid off. Hinard likely purchased an enslaved woman as a dowry for Mercedes with the proceeds.

In 1810, the court declared the estate insolvent. For four long years, Mercedes and Carolina had watched their substantial inheritance dissipated by the estate’s de facto executor, John Innerarity. The heirs stood little chance. Innerarity was one of Pensacola’s most influential people, the local representative of the powerful John Forbes & Company, which also happened to be the estate’s largest creditor.

The day after she turned 16, Mercedes Vidal married Severino Palao. Palao was a carpenter and fellow free person of color who had a claim to almost 700 acres of waterfront property just west of Pensacola. Their first child, Severino, was born the following year. Valmon arrived in 1816. Months later, Mercedes sold the woman who constituted her dowry and used the proceeds as a down payment for a house the couple purchased on Indentencia Street. Yet the marriage suffered. Mercedes later shared how the relationship caused her “great suffering and unhappiness.”

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Mercedes and her sister never gave up on their inheritance. In 1817, Carolina wrote the first of seven petitions to the Spanish governor for information about what Innerarity had done with their father’s estate. Innerarity evaded the Vidal heirs for years — that is until the Americans arrived.

Ten days after the United States officially took control of Pensacola, 26-year-old Mercedes Vidal cornered the new American alcalde (senior civil official), Henry Brackenridge. She told him how Innerarity had stolen her inheritance and evaded justice. She showed him the evidence. He wanted more. She got it. Only then did Brackenridge share the story with Governor Andrew Jackson. Incensed by the abuse of power and influence, Jackson would later write that he had been shocked by “such a scene of combined wickedness and corruption.”

Ailing and aggrieved by a seemingly unending series of frustrations in Florida, Jackson demanded the Spanish turn over all documents related to the estate. Jackson was rebuffed and threw the former Spanish governor in jail, causing a minor international incident. But he eventually got the papers and presided over Mercede’s suit against Innerarity. He ruled in her favor.

A week before Jackson’s decision, Mercedes Vidal filed for divorce from her husband of 10 years. Brackenridge and Richard Keith Call, a future Florida territorial governor, represented her in both cases.

The new Escambia County Court granted the divorce in September 1821. Following Spanish law (less equitable American laws soon came into effect), the court ordered an equal division of property after Mercedes’s $400 dowry was repaid. The couple’s property was auctioned. Mercedes purchased the “new and elegant” mahogany bedstand and six chairs. Severino bought the mattress and blanket.

Four months later, the sheriff held another auction. This time, the auctioneer sold John Innerarity’s property — including two enslaved women, household goods and 2,350 “Cavalry swords” — for the benefit of the Vidal heirs.

With these proceeds, Mercedes was able to stay in her home on Indentencia Street. Pensacola, however, became an increasingly hostile place for free women of color. Many left. By the mid-1830s, she confronted financial insecurity once again. She lost parts of her downtown property to tax sales until the last section of her parcel was sold in 1840 to pay delinquent taxes. By this time, however, she had moved to New Orleans, where she headed a large household. Vidal would open a store in the booming port, though it too became mired in debt.

On the eve of the Civil War, Vidal was the enslaver of a 40-year-old woman. She operated a stall in the New Orleans vegetable market during the war.

Mercedes Vidal spent her final years experiencing yet another upheaval along the Gulf Coast as the promise of Reconstruction gave way to White terrorism. She died in July 1879, two blocks from Jackson Square and a short walk from where she was born.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Righting the past: Mercedes Vidal, center of territorial scandal, dead at 84