Abused Wives, Embarrassed Husbands, and Ambivalent Slaves

In 1824, twenty-year-old Evelina Roane petitioned the Virginia General Assembly to grant her a divorce. Since her marriage just eighteen months previously, she averred, her husband had repeatedly and viciously attacked her, their infant child, and the household slaves, making the Roane home "a scene of unbounded rage and awful violence" (p. 49). Roane, like the vast majority of wives who brought allegations of abuse, adultery, alcoholism, and abandonment in the antebellum South, obtained a divorce. As Loren Schweninger contends in his tightly constructed study of marital strife and dissolution, by bringing such claims to state legislatures and chancery courts, white women in the antebellum South not only escaped untenable situations but also "advanced the rights of married women before the law" (p. 62).

Families in Crisis in the Old South is both concise and comprehensive. In just 130 pages of text, Schweninger succinctly summarizes his findings based on "a small but representative group of divorce, separation, and alimony cases, drawn from every southern state and most geographic regions within each state and from virtually every year during the first six decades of the nineteenth century" (p. xi). Schweninger bases his analysis on the records of chancery (or equity) courts, where judges relied on statute law and applied the concept of equity rather than following common law and basing their decisions on precedent. Because plaintiffs and witnesses offered detailed accounts of their domestic situations, this sample supplied Schweninger with roughly 8,000 pages of documentary evidence, which he sorted in such categories as the plaintiff's gender, race, and slaveholding status; the length of marriage and number of children; the specific complaint (or, more often, multiple complaints); and the ultimate resolution of the case. Based on this common-sense analysis, Schweninger is able to offer definitive answers to questions about the most frequent complaints (for wives, domestic violence; for husbands, adultery) and plaintiffs' success rates (a remarkably high 81 percent for wives and 77 percent for husbands).

He also offers provocative analyses of gender, race, and slaveholding as these factors played out in family dynamics, often coming to surprising conclusions. For instance, despite the prevailing sexual double standard, both husbands and wives were usually successful in cases in which they sought divorce on the grounds of adultery. However, slaveholding wives were more likely to bring this complaint than their nonslaveholding counterparts; while among men, nonslaveholding husbands were more likely than slaveholders were to seek a divorce on grounds of infidelity. Moreover, contrary to assumptions that slaveholding men commonly sexually abused their own slaves, most adulterous male defendants had engaged in extramarital sex with white women; only a minority (about one-third) came to court to answer charges of dalliances with the slave women on their property. Of course, Schweninger's evidence only takes into account those couples who made their private lives a matter of public record; as he acknowledges, slaveholding men may not have had to answer charges of sexually assaulting their slaves because "their neighbors accepted such behavior as a normal by-product of the slave system" (p. 22). Only when slaveholding men granted their slave concubines special privileges that challenged the wife's position as mistress of the household did white male/ black female extramarital sex become a matter for the courts. Schweninger also reveals that nearly three-quarters of husbands who charged their wives with adultery identified the wives' sexual partners as either free or enslaved African Americans, a fact that further complicates our understanding of the racial and sexual dynamics of the slaveholding South.

Because free African Americans rarely brought divorce cases to court, and enslaved African Americans' marriages had no legal standing, it is impossible to fully integrate them into Schweninger's account. While Schweninger amply demonstrates that "racial issues often lurked under the surface or rose to become the primary cause of divorce or separation" (p. xiv) among Southern whites, and he correctly acknowledges...