From Anger to Jealousy: Explaining Domestic Homicide in Antebellum America

This essay argues that in the sensational 1859 trial of Daniel Sickles for the murder of his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key, jealousy appeared, for the first time, as a normative masculine emotion and as instinct—as, moreover, integral to marital love and as a legitimate explanation for domestic violence. Although Sickles' lawyers presented their client's jealous rage as thoroughly understandable—indeed, inevitable—their narrative represented a break with legal precedent, with case after case of domestic homicide in which jealousy was either absent or was present only to be condemned as a vicious passion. Instead, through the first few decades of the nineteenth century, anger, not jealousy, routinely appeared as the principal cause of troubled relations between husbands and wives. In articulating the legal pre-history of the Sickles trial this essay discloses that jealousy, purportedly innate within men, was absent: earlier cases reveal that in fact jealousy was not a shared property of men and hardly ever a motive of domestic homicide. Cases prior to Sickles are also bereft of romantic love and of apotheosized domestic life, twinned ideals that formed an integral part of the emergence of jealousy as inevitable and excusable in Daniel Sickles' trial.