Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War by Allison Dorothy Fredette (review)

In Marriage on the Border, Allison Fredette explores the in-between. She trains her eye on the far-northern reaches of American slaveholding, spaces so close to the North and the Midwest that the inhabitants did not fit easily into any established mold. These borderlands provide a rich base for Fredette to examine how people imagined and lived as husbands and wives in communities without one dominant regional culture to shape their norms. Through letters, sermons, speeches, advice manuals, and court records, she discovers what these spouses prioritized in their marriages, be it love, partnership, protection, or authority. She also examines what they could not tolerate, and how they sought to remedy relationships that did not meet their expectations.

In this space-centric study, Fredette has chosen six counties, four of which lie along or near the border between the North and South in Kentucky, western Virginia, and West Virginia. The other two counties, Fauquier and Amelia, lie in solidly southern territory—eastern Virginia—to provide contrast. From the late antebellum period through the Civil War and well into Reconstruction, Fredette illuminates the ideas and actions of courting, married, and divorcing couples in these places, all of which have a history with slavery and the hierarchical social structures considered necessary to maintain it. Franklin and Warren Counties in Kentucky, slaveholding throughout the war years but well connected to the commercial North and bustling Midwest, provide for fertile exploration of the varied regional influences that shaped views on marriage. Western Virginia’s secession from Virginia and its emergence as a Union state during the war allows Fredette the chance to determine how and where western Virginians fit along the spectrum of opinions regarding marriage and gender roles. She examines records left by residents living in Ohio County, West Virginia, and just over the mountain in Tazewell County, in southwestern Virginia. Fredette asks of these border areas: Did residents view the social institution of marriage differently from those in eastern Virginia? Did the cultural hybridity of Kentucky and western (then West) Virginia reflect differently in gender roles from those in the more entrenched South?

Divorce records are central to Fredette’s quest to answer these questions, and her analysis of them forms the strongest and most compelling part of her research. She argues that divorce was an increasingly popular remedy for disappointed spouses of the border South. Men and women living in the Kentucky counties, followed by spouses in the western Virginia counties, were more inclined to seek to end their unions when those unions no longer met their needs or the standards they set for marriage. Those standards, Fredette argues, involved marrying for love, companionship, and mutuality, which was a result of a variety of cultural impulses and not unexpected from communities invested in social hierarchy and slaveholding. In their reach for divorces and in the arguments spouses made to secure them, Fredette finds a growing comfort with contractualism and individualism along the southern border. Residents of Kentucky and West Virginia who filed for divorce were less bound by the idea that marriage was a sacred, permanent institution. If it, as a contract, no longer worked for them, husbands or wives, or sometimes husbands and wives, could break that contract and pursue their own individual futures, unlike their counterparts in eastern Virginia, where, according to Fredette, social control of both slaves and women remained a priority.

Notably, Fredette found this phenomenon to be present in the border South even in the antebellum period. Though in many studies of the mid-nineteenth century, the war emerges as a dividing line between life before and after, for these border residents Fredette does not see the war as pivotal on the subject of mutuality and contractualism in marriage. The conflict certainly disrupted plenty of marriages, and more border southerners sought divorces as...