Marriage

While the Cambridge Dictionary defines marriage as “a legally accepted relationship between two people in which they live together, or the official ceremony,” CWRGM employs this subject tag whenever an author references marriage regardless of whether it was legally binding or not.

In the nineteenth century, marriage was shaped by coverture, an element of English common law dating back to the Middle Ages, which held that a married woman’s legal status fell under her husband’s. Married women could not sue or own property, including their own wages, and they did not legally have control over the lives of their children or of their own bodies. Wives were expected to manage the household or the domestic sphere. For most, these responsibilities included cooking, cleaning, and nurturing children, although elite white women in the South were also expected to manage household slaves, even violently.

Coverture, however, did not just shape the lives of women. Husbands were responsible for providing financial support for their families and for all aspects of the public sphere of life. Women, then, sometimes used the law and sentimental appeal to pressure recalcitrant husbands or even more broadly men in their communities to provide for their families. Poor white women, for example, sometimes used this argument to persuade public and private orphan institutions to accept their children, especially when their own husbands failed to live up to their roles as providers. This aspect of coverture played out most acutely in the South during the Civil War. By embracing their identities as “soldiers’ wives,” poor white women demanded that the Confederacy provide them with political protection and provide for their basic needs. In places like Richmond, Virginia, such women took to the streets in what historians call the “bread riots,” where they demanded public assistance, but their identities as dependent “wives” were central to this activism.

Because marriage was a civil contract, enslaved men and women did not have these same legal protections and obligations. However, within the limitations of slavery, they married by mutual agreement, selecting their own partners in many cases, and they maintained affectionate marriages that mimicked the gender roles of the dominant culture. Men attempted to live out their roles as the heads of their families, while subordinate wives took responsibility for the domestic sphere. However, because these marriages were not legally binding and were subject to the needs and desires of the planter class, slavery made these marriages distinctive. For example, when husbands and wives had different enslavers, they were unable to cohabitate. In other cases, enslavers selected pairings based on their own whims, removing the possibility of choice. Finally, enslaved couples also recognized that marriage did not protect them from the Domestic Slave Trade. They could – and did – face separations.

During Reconstruction, former slaveholding states were forced to pass laws that gave Black marriages the same legal protections as those of white men and women. However, this legal arm became a new way for white supremacists to control Black families. Couples who cohabited without that civil contract would be punished, and these men and women could be condemned for bigamy and adultery in cases where the slave trade had forced them to consent to multiple partners. Nevertheless, while some formerly enslaved men and women were ambivalent to legal marriage because of these punitive standards, most did embrace the opportunity for these legal protections, even seeing it as one step towards realizing full equality.

(Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Ruth Poe White, “Orphans, White Unity, and the Charleston Orphan House, 1860-1870; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household; Stpehanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South; Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History)