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2. Dred and the Freedom of Marriage Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Fiction of Law Echoing Brown’s critique of southern religious teachers who act against the principle of marriage in their support of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe draws a similar connection in her 1856 novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Quoting from the “Rev. Robert J. Breckenridge, D.D. a member of the Old School Assembly” in the novel’s appendix, ironically entitled “Church Action on Slavery,” Stowe reveals the complicity of the Presbyterian Church— “in whose communion the greater part of the slaveholding Presbyterians of the South are found”—of upholding a system that denies legal marriage to all slaves. Breckenridge calls the marriages between slaves “a state of concubinage ” rather than marriage because “in the eye of the law, no colored slave-man is the husband of any wife in particular, nor any slave-woman the wife of any husband in particular.”1 From the French adjective concubinage, the term refers to the cohabiting of a man and a woman who are not legally married. Although the English translation of the term has a pejorative connotation , in the context of Stowe’s second antislavery novel, it signifies an attempt to circumvent the legal terms by which slavery and marriage are defined. By conjoining her argument against slavery with her defense of “the sanctity of marriage,” Stowe presents slave-marriage as a relationship that operates according to the principles of higher law. Slaves, as Brown depicted them in his fictional and autobiographical writings , lacked the legal capacity for matrimony: A slave wife could not commit herself to her slave husband, nor a husband to his wife. She would never live within his household, for a slave could have no household. He had little capacity and no legal power to protect her. Her person and her children belonged to the slave master. Their union was always subject to separation by sale or i-x_1-150_Chakk.indd 31 5/20/11 2:05 PM gift. According to the legal history, a marriage between slaves could not exist .2 Marriage, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, was anathema to the slave because the very condition of the slave made it impossible to uphold the principles of marriage. “It is easy to perceive,” Tocqueville writes, “that every motive which incites the freedman to a lawful union is lost to the slave by the simple fact of his slavery.”3 But as this reading of Dred begins to suggest, Stowe did not perceive the matter of marriage among slaves to be so simple. In fact, Stowe situates marriage at the center of her antislavery fiction. Slaves might not have had the legal right to marry, but they were married nonetheless. The higher-law tradition Stowe invokes in her rendering of slave-marriage is complex and includes a wide range of models regarding the institution of marriage, but her core idea is constant: Marriage must be a free and equal partnership between a man and a woman based on mutual affection and desire. Stowe’s definition of marriage departs in crucial ways from the legal terms of marriage laid out in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England . “By marriage,” Blackstone means “the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”4 Under the legal doctrine of coverture, as described by Blackstone, the wife’s legal identity was effectively absorbed into her husband’s. All her “personal”propertywastransferredtoherhusbandatthetimeofthemarriage. The central issue for most mid-nineteenth-century critics of coverture was that it created and maintained inequality between the sexes. As Sarah Grimké argued in her account of women’s oppression in marriage, “Man seems to feel that Marriage gives him the control of Woman’s person just as the Law gives him the control of her property. Thus are her most sacred rights destroyed by that very act, which, under the laws of Nature should enlarge, establish & protect them.”5 Given the inherently unequal conditions produced by legal marriage, many argued for abolishing the institution altogether or, at the very least, loosening its legal constraints by making divorce more accessible. Stowe opposed any such radical action against marriage. Instead, Stowe insisted, the problem was not with marriage but in the legal conception of it. In the plot of her subsequent novel, The...

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