The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South

6. Marriage Strategies and Family Formation

6 Marriage Strategies and Family Formation A great deal of the historical disagreement concerning slave family life has revolved, and continues to revolve, around the issues of marriage strategies and family formation. For much of the twentieth century, historians of southern slavery believed that family formation was essentially nonexistent in the slave quarters, with interpretations varying from perceived character deficiencies among African Americans to the oppressive nature of bondage. Traditional views of slave families held that relationships between enslaved men and women had been fleeting and casual affairs, resulting in a preponderance of single mothers and unattached men. By consequence, slave families had been predominantly matrifocal and only loosely organized.1 In the 1970s, however, new evidence that long-term slave marriages and two-parent households were the norm throughout the South led scholars to reject the traditional paradigm, but different causal theories for the newly perceived stability of slave families added fuel to the fire of the emerging slave agency debate. Herbert Gutman, for example, argued that long-lasting marriages and two-parent households among slaves were largely the result of their “inner strength” and determination to assert their humanity in the face of a brutal and dehumanizing system. Fogel and Engerman, on the other hand, attributed the perceived prevalence of two-parent households among the slave population to the interference and incentives of slaveholders , whose interest in encouraging the establishment of cohesive slave families stemmed from their desire to discourage flight and increase the labor force through natural reproduction. More recent studies by historians such as Brenda Stevenson, Larry Hudson, Wilma Dunaway, and Emily West have complicated these views by consistently arguing that although marriage and family formation were indeed the norm among slaves, twoparent households were nowhere near universal. As yet the extent to which Marriage Strategies and Family Formation / 143 different domestic arrangements were adopted by enslaved couples, as well as the reasons for such arrangements, is still far from clear.2 In the very simplest terms, slaves could pursue one of two strategies when they sought to marry and establish a nuclear family. First, they could choose a spouse from the home plantation, in which case they formed co-residential marriages and two-parent households. Second, they could marry a slave (or free black) who lived outside of the home plantation, forming cross-plantation marriages and divided households (frequently called “broad” or “abroad” families). Certainly a number of factors influenced slaves’ marriage choices—including, of course, love and physical attraction, as well as coercion by white masters—but as this chapter will show, the different social landscapes in various localities appear to have been at the root of slaves’ decisions, as the nature of slaveholding in different regions confronted enslaved men and women with different boundaries and opportunities for marriage and family formation across time and space.3 This chapter examines the nature of slave family formation as determined by slaveholding size and sex ratios. How did enslaved people adapt to the physical and demographic boundaries of their containment when seeking a mate? What were the consequences for their domestic arrangements and family structures? By comparing families in different parts of the non-cotton South, this chapter will show that antebellum slaves usually strove to create two-parent households whenever possible; however, not all were able to realize that ideal, and those who could not adapted their marriage strategies and family lives accordingly. Transcending the Geography of Containment: Fairfax County, Virginia Ascertaining slave family structure in northern Virginia or any other region of the antebellum South provides a considerable challenge. Because slave marriages were not legally recognized, few nineteenth-century sources document family ties at all. In official sources only the mothers of small children are mentioned with anything approaching regularity (especially if they were to be sold together), but fathers are only very rarely indicated. Moreover, slave marriages were frequently ruptured, most notably by sale and estate divisions, but also by death and sometimes by voluntary separation . Elijah Fletcher, for one, observed on Thomson Mason’s plantation in 1810 that sometimes “a man and woman will make some agreement between themselves . . . till they disagree, and then will part.” Certainly not all 144 / Part III. Social Landscapes: Family Structure and Stability slave marriages ended so abruptly, but the breakup of slave unions, whether forced or voluntary, meant that families’ domestic arrangements were continually being established and reestablished over time, making it tricky for...