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Introduction The Slave-Marriage Plot A slave marrying according to law is a thing unknown in the history of American slavery. —Henry Bibb (1849) What is a “slave-marriage” and what relationship does it bear to a legal marriage ? Hidden from law and subject to separation, a slave-marriage was considered in nineteenth-century America to be so far outside the purview of legal forms of marriage that it seemed hardly worth mentioning. Lacking the legal capacity for matrimony, marriage for slaves, as Henry Bibb asserts in his 1849 slave narrative, “is a thing unknown in the history of American slavery.”1 But that is not to say, as Bibb’s own marriage to Malinda proves, that slaves did not marry. As a number of slave testimonies and cases heard after the abolition of slavery suggest, slaves married in spite of the law that stipulated “the slave could not marry because he was legally incapable to consent, because the relation of husband and wife was inconsistent with that of master and slave.”2 Efforts to legalize slave-marriages following emancipation suggest that their marriages were, in fact, just as valued as legal marriages even though they were performed, originally, without legal sanction. Performed without the law, the slave-marriage was a figment of the slave’s imagination inscribed in the form of fiction—but a fiction, as the following chapters reveal, with very real effects. Novel Bondage examines the form of slave-marriages through a reading of nineteenth-century novels and short stories that inscribed their occurrence and describes how these nonlegal unions challenged what it meant to be husband and wife in nineteenth-century America. This book thus has several goals. It begins to fill a long-standing gap in our knowledge about the slave-marriage and the function it performed in political debates regarding slavery and emancipation. In particular, it examines the ways in which fictional accounts of slave-marriage were understood by the law, and i-x_1-150_Chakk.indd 1 5/20/11 2:05 PM 2 introduction it demonstrates how both the form of these fictions and readers’ responses to them were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage. Without the law on their side, slave-marriages varied widely in how they were performed. Some slaves married for love; others were joined, often against the wishes of one or both of the marrying couple, for the purposes of multiplying a slaveholder’s assets, while others resisted marriage altogether, fearing that marriage would make escape virtually impossible.3 Unlike a legal marriage in which marriage altered the status of those entering into the institution , marriage did not change the condition of a slave. Slaves were slaves for life, but their marriages were not. A slave-marriage could be dissolved at any time, by sale or gift. The fact that slave law did not recognize marriages formed by slaves was a central, but often neglected, feature of arguments against slavery. Being denied the right to marry, as William Wells Brown explains in his 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, makes slavery not only an economic problem of labor but also an affective problem of intimacy: “Not content with depriving them of all the higher and holier enjoyments of this relation, by degrading and darkening their souls, the slaveholder denies to his victim even that slight alleviation of his misery, which would result from the marriage relation being protected by law and public opinion.”4 Contrary to the well-known feminist critique of legal marriage that viewed the slave and the wife as one, Brown argues that legal marriage has the power to actually alleviate the condition of the slave. Compared with the preeminent rights that slaves were denied—the right to vote and to own their bodies and labor—the denial of their right to marry was of less transcendent, yet more immediate, importance. Although Brown’s novel uses the denial of marriage as the basis for its antislavery argument, it is a novel preoccupied by the singularity of the slave’s relationship to marriage: “[M]arriage . . . is a matter which the slaveholders do not think is of any importance, or of any binding force with their slaves; yet it would be doing that degraded class an injustice, not to acknowledge that many of them do regard it as a sacred obligation, and show a willingness to obey the commands of God...

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