The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion (review)

That the catastrophe to which Buckley's title refers was not a divorce but a disastrous marriage establishes the sympathetic tone marking his examination of 583 divorce petitions received by the Virginia General Assembly from 1786 until 1851, at which time a new state constitution prohibited all legislative divorces. Without locating the process within broader patterns of nineteenth-century legal discourse, the book's first substantive chapter narrates a shift from the legislature's exclusive power over divorce to its relying on state courts to determine the facts of each case and to its empowering the courts in 1849 to grand divorce for specific causes.

Thereafter, Buckley focuses on the social factors that determined the success or failure of those seeking divorce. Because Virginia legislators valued social stasis more than individual happiness and believed that secure government rested on stable families, they generally refused relief except when competing values of patriarchal power, racial taboos, the protection of property, or the welfare of children outweighed their commitment to marital permanence. Consequently, the husbands of women whose adultery ignored racial proscriptions and the battered wives of men whose violence defied patriarchal protection of white women more readily petitioned the legislature, gained family and communal support for their petitions, and achieved divorce. Similarly, a divorce was more likely when a husband's behavior endangered the property of his wife's family or when marriage to a bride made pregnant by another constituted a fraud on her husband than when either spouse sought freedom on the simple grounds of adultery or desertion. By comparison with such secular values, evangelical preaching played only a secondary role except as it reinforced them.

Based primarily on the divorce petitions and accompanying documents sent to the Virginia legislature in increasing numbers over a sixty-year period, Buckley's study is narrower than Norma Basch's Framing American Divorce (Berkeley, 1999). Only minimally theoretical, The Great Catastrophe lacks the perspective that a comparison with other states' divorce laws and procedures, ranging from South Carolina's absolute prohibition of divorce to Indiana's wide-open permissiveness, would have given it. Yet, Buckley's analysis, sensitive as it is to gender-determined differences shaping the grounds for, and success of, divorce petitions, implicitly challenges Basch's argument that the shift from legislative to judicial proceedings and the enactment of specific grounds for divorce—most commonly adultery or desertion—provided women a more sympathetic forum than the lobbying and political processes that had previously made divorce largely a male prerogative. In Virginia, however, Buckley finds that more women than men petitioned the legislature for divorce and that the success rate for each sex was an identical 33 percent.

Although he refers to several sociological and psychological theories that might explain the roots of antebellum marital violence, Buckley makes no convincing case for any of them. Rather, as he does with the statistics that establish the boundaries of his subject, he subordinates theory to the mining of official documents and, to a lesser degree, private letters to elucidate the experience of individual petitioners and the rationales that their supporters and opponents used. The narrative of Sally McDowell Thomas' marriage, divorce, and second marriage illustrates the cogency of this method. The daughter of a Virginia governor, Sally married a governor of Maryland whose tawdry, perhaps insane, attacks on her alleged behavior roused popular indignation and propelled the legislature to speed the divorce on which her father insisted to shield family honor. Even so, the social stigma of being a divorced woman so burdened her that she almost rejected a deeply affectionate marriage to an eminently respectable Presbyterian cleric. Buckley uses that tale to condemn the "'ladies,' who were the guardians of antebellum propriety ... [upholding] the social conservatism embedded in the foundations of southern culture" (263). But the...