Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South

CHAPTER 2 Courting Women, Courting God: Strenuous Courtships and Holy Unions

59 chapter 2 Courting Women, Courting God Strenuous Courtships and Holy Unions Unlike other points in the life course, where women often pushed the bounds of their influence beyond the narrow limits suggested in advice literature, single women discovered that clergy and kin alike sanctioned women’sauthorityincourtship.Astrenuouscourtshipofferedsinglewomen the only assurance that they might achieve a harmonious and companionate ideal in marriage where “mutual respect and romantic love” between husband and wife would lead to the conversion and heavenly reunification of the entire family in heaven.1 After marriage, women in unhappy or even abusive relationships had few avenues for public redress—divorce or even support from clergymen or fellow congregants remained elusive. The best safeguards for women’s happiness remained extended courtships that tested suitors’ patience, faith, and affection. This process unfolded on two fronts: at church and at home, where couples found themselves under the ever-watchful eyes of others; and through correspondence, where men and women set out to overcome suspicion and ritual and forge genuine bonds of love. Faith and God remained at the center of this process. With a collective vision of heaven and growing concern about the passage of faith from one generation to the next, evangelicals desperately wanted to ensure 60 Chapter Two that piety spread throughout the family tree. The distrust and testing inherent in courtships allowed evangelical families simultaneously to assess suitors’ character and piety and their depth of feeling. Even a presumably safe match with an impeccably pious man did not prevent a woman from using her faith to frustrate her suitor’s rush to marriage. She might call off the courtship altogether after prayerful reconsideration of the match, or she might mention that her filial obligations to an aging parent prevented her from seriously entertaining courtship. Men may have initiated courtships, but as they progressed, women often took control. Pious men gauged their potential for success in courtship on women’s willingness to share their feelings and imagine a future together, a process that inevitably included discussion of faith and family. Evangelical values thus placed a sharper edge on many of the characteristics that historians have traditionally identified with courtship patterns in the antebellum South: circumspection and even alienation between men and women in the courtship process, continued involvement of family members in courtship decisions, and the challenge of discovering personal fulfillment against such a ritual-laden backdrop. These courtship characteristics, particularly among the planter class, contrast sharply with northern courtship patterns in this era, in which couples had privacy from parents, engaged in a quest for mutual self-discovery, and ultimately made falling in love a precondition for marriage.2 While these authors point to the numerous hurdles that northern couples encountered—particularly the vulnerabilities that candor in courtship created for men and women alike—such works orient courtship around individualism and affection to a much greater degree than do most historians of the antebellum South. Indeed, Karen Lystra contends that “romantic love contributed to the displacement of God by the lover as the central symbol of ultimate significance.” Moreover, she contends, nineteenth-century middleclass Americans “were making deities of each other in the new theology of romantic love.”3 Southern evangelicals would have insisted that their courtships and marriages retained much greater room for God and piety but like their northern counterparts would have aspired to construct companionate marriages. But the means of southern courtships—particularly limiting courtship to public settings and including family opinion in the courtship process—diverged strikingly from emerging northern patterns in this era. Courting Women, Courting God 61 Although nonevangelicals and evangelicals used many of the same means of courtship, evangelicals differed greatly from their secular counterparts in their desired ends. First, evangelicals believed that spouses dramatically shaped individuals’ odds of obtaining evangelicalism’s greatest promise, that of life eternal. Second, evangelical men and women imagined their journey to heaven commencing at their own doorstep. To court outside of one’s denomination or beyond the evangelical fold altogether jeopardized the collective satisfaction of sharing piety within the household. In short, evangelical faith mattered enormously in courtship decisions because it forced men and women to assess their choice in light of eternal judgment, not merely happiness in the foreseeable future. Faith inspired some evangelical southerners to marry pious individuals from lower social classes, even when family members protested. In spite of her brother...