Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law by Loren Schweninger (review)

During the last few decades, historians have explored various facets of American marital breakdown. Other than the nationwide surveys, such as Norma Basch's excellent Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley, 2001), many of these studies have focused on an area or a state. Scholars have not attempted to find regional similarities in divorce cases and decrees across the South for many years.

Those who wish a wider perspective on southern divorce during the antebellum period will warmly greet Schweninger's new book. Pulling its evidence from materials gathered as part of the huge Race and Slavery Petitions microfilm project, Families in Crisis relies on 758 divorce or separation cases from the equity courts of every slaveholding state and the District of Columbia.¹ Not only did the larger project determine the outcome of cases whenever possible, it also provided information about the slaveholding levels of those involved. The project's focus on slavery and race possibly excluded some poorer white southerners, but that group's tendency to depend on informal or "self divorce" could render this omission relatively unimportant. Although divorce petitions form the core of the book, Schweninger thoroughly indicates the varied laws that governed legal separations and divorces in the antebellum South.

In addition to this statistical picture of causes, judgments, and outcomes, Schweninger uses six specific trials as focal points for each chapter's topic. For example, his chapter about adultery pivots on a Texas divorce case in which a wife charged her husband of committing adultery with enslaved women. The author finds significant gender and class differences in divorces based on adultery. Women tended to include adultery among other grounds; only one-half of them mentioned interracial affairs. In contrast, the vast majority of husbands who sued for divorce charged adultery, and two-thirds of those alleging unfaithfulness declared their wife to have had an African-American paramour. The great majority of these white male plaintiffs, however, were not from the slaveholding classes. Schweninger interprets this disparity as arising from the unwillingness of propertied men to make charges of interracial sex that would humiliate their wives and rupture family and social ties. Yet the rigid conventions about sexuality and behavior of women in slaveholding families might actually have lessened the possibility of interracial encounters for these women.

In addition to adultery, Schweninger extensively covers the petitions alleging alcoholism, cruelty, and abandonment, showing that the courts tended to grant a high proportion of petitions, especially those from women. In fact, both men and women became more successful in their quests for a divorce when such actions were moved from the legislatures to the courts. But the women formed a much larger proportion of those seeking as well as obtaining judicial decrees. Schweninger reveals how women increasingly relied on attorneys to frame their cases effectively. Although future studies of divorce in individual states may well challenge some of these statistical findings, the book's rich detail and careful analysis greatly enhance our current understanding of marital breakdown in the Old South.