Shire, Laurel Clark
The Threshold of Manifest Destiny,
07/2016
Book Chapter
In 1831 Victoria LeSassier, a wealthy Pensacola widow in her seventies, divorced her second husband, Pedro de Alba. Deeply in debt, Alba had recently threatened to take control of his wife’s separate estate, which was worth about $36,000. His financial problems had plagued their marriage since 1819, when LeSassier, suspecting that he had attempted to poison her in order to inherit her property, left Alba’s household and went to live with her son. She wrote Alba that she was quitting their marriage because he had treated her so badly that even a slave would have complained, and warned him: “But,
