Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century by Tera W. Hunter (review)

It has now been over fifty years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" first appeared in 1965. Characterizing mid-twentieth-century urban black families as disorganized, dysfunctional, and matriarchal legacies of slavery, Moynihan's report not only generated heated debates amongst politicians, activists, and policymakers, but also helped to spark a wave of scholarship interrogating the history of black gender and family dynamics in the nineteenth century. Since that time, scholars have done much to shed light on the domestic ideals and practices of enslaved and recently emancipated African Americans. Still, as Tera W. Hunter notes, this scholarship has remained mired in—or at the very least, influenced in part by—some of the same questions guiding Moynihan: Were enslaved black families irreparably damaged or resilient? Were they usually two-parent families headed by fathers, or were they matrifocal in structure? And which of these models should we consider to be more egalitarian?

In Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century, Tera W. Hunter seeks to move away from these longstanding lines of inquiry. Widening the scope of her study beyond analyses of the patriarchal, nuclear family, Hunter shows that enslaved and free black Americans embraced a variety of marriage practices before, during, and after the Civil War. Moreover, Hunter offers an astute analysis of the political significance of these couplings, interrogating the various ways they were understood by slaves, slaveholders, free blacks, and assorted representatives of the state. What emerges is a rich and nuanced portrait of African American marriage and family life during decades of profound turmoil and change.

Using a range of sources—including published slave narratives, Works Progress Administration interviews, court cases, Civil War pension claims, divorce proceedings, personal letters, and the records of the Freedmen's Bureau—Hunter finds that enslaved men and women negotiated slavery by creating intimate partnerships with each other that were "quite complex and not visible to those judging them through the conventional lenses of heterosexual marriage." These relationships existed "on a spectrum that ranged from openly acknowledging their vulnerability," to the "short-lived," to those that were as permanent as possible given their participants' status as chattel (31). These domestic ties and customs were tested during the instability, death, and upheaval accompanying the Civil War and its aftermath, which Hunter frames as a time to "make and unmake conjugal bonds" (153). For those bondswomen and men who chose to wed "under the flag" in Union contraband camps or to legalize their marital status under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau, marriages could serve as "one of the first 'rites' of freedom" (123). For other freedwomen and men, however, longstanding extralegal marriage practices remained preferable, offering partners the flexibility they needed to build (or rebuild) and sustain viable relationships of their own choosing and to prioritize the needs of their families and kin over the wishes of federal agents and planters.

In addition to detailing the variety and adaptability of enslaved men and women's marriage practices, Hunter also offers an insightful examination of the racial politics of the institution of marriage in the nineteenth-century United States. Because marriage was a civil status bound up with property rights, the ability to make contracts, the duties and privileges of heads of households, and the obligations of citizens, "most legal theorists, judges, lawyers, legislators, and slave-owners" in the early nineteenth century agreed that "slave marriages could not be made legal" (64). Doing so potentially imbued slaves with rights that they, as chattels personal, could not legally possess, and threatened the property rights and authority of slave-owners who were, by the logic of slavery, the lawful beneficiaries of the productive and reproductive labor of their human property. This tension is especially apparent, Hunter finds, in the tenuous and fragile circumstances of mixed-status (free black and...