Marriage on the Border

Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War

Allison Dorothy Fredette

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813179186
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. Here, the era's clashing values—slavery and freedom, city and country, industry and agriculture—met and melded. In factories and plantations along the Ohio River, a unique regional identity emerged: one rooted in kinship, tolerance, and compromise. Border families articulated these hybrid values in both the legislative hall and the home. While many defended patriarchal households as an essential part of slaveholding culture, communities on the border pressed for increased mutuality between husbands and wives.

Drawing on court records, personal correspondence, and prescriptive literature, Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War follows border southerners into their homes through blissful betrothal and turbulent divorce. Allison Dorothy Fredette examines how changing divorce laws in the border regions of Kentucky and West Virginia reveal surprisingly progressive marriages throughout the antebellum and postwar Upper South. Although many states feared that loosening marriage's gender hierarchy threatened slavery's racial hierarchy, border couples redefined traditionally permanent marriages as consensual contracts—complete with rules and escape clauses. Men and women on the border built marriages on mutual affection, and when that affection faded, filed for divorce at unprecedented rates. Highlighting the tenuous relationship between racial and gendered rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century, Marriage on the Border offers a fresh perspective on the institution of marriage and its impact on the social fabric of the United States.

Part 1

Before the Storm

1

To Form an Enviable Marriage

In late autumn 1833, Ellen Green of Henderson, Kentucky, wrote a lengthy letter to her fiancé, Hector Green, ruminating on their future together. As their wedding approached, Ellen grew anxious and worked to ensure that her husband-to-be shared her views about domestic tranquility. To make a marriage happy, she wrote, a husband and wife must be those “whom nature formed for each other, who have no divided wish, or thought, and the sanction of one seems all that is desired by the other.” A pair such as this, she told Hector, would sustain all kinds of financial, emotional, and familial strain. She had clearly spent many hours envisioning this relationship, even creating a fictionalized couple to stand in for her own aspirations. Lovingly, she described the pair to her future partner. “We see the happy Norman, returning from his toilsome occupation, with a heart overflowing with love for his cherished partner, and the smiles, and endearing fondness of Monimia serve as a compensation for his arduous labours,” Ellen told Hector, painting a picture of marital bliss that would strike a chord in many nineteenth-century middle-class homes. “Norman’s happiness is in his own domestic circle, where the intelligent converse, and animated countenance of Monimia, serve as his magnet of attraction.” This, she stated, was an “enviable” marriage.¹

Ellen Green’s idealized vision of a perfect marriage reflects the rise of a new domestic ideal in early nineteenth-century America. By the 1830s, Americans and their Victorian counterparts in western Europe celebrated and glorified the domestic sphere as a haven, safe from the hectic new world of modern industrialized societies. Similarly, a growing sentimentality showed that romantic love and companionate marriages were becoming common in this transatlantic world. Tucked away on the western border of Kentucky and Indiana, Ellen Green was not isolated from these developments. Influenced by this transatlantic cultural transformation and the growth of a middle-class sentimentality, Ellen, and her fellow residents of Kentucky and western Virginia, were firmly a part of this story, embracing domesticity and mutuality in their lives and in their households.

Kentuckians and western Virginians’ relationships reflected these ideals in a variety of ways. When courting, young border South residents firmly stated their desire to build marriages based on affection, love, and mutual happiness. They spent hours pouring their souls into correspondence, as they sought emotional and intellectual compatibility, and when they finally succeeded in securing a mate, they received advice manuals from friends and family members that urged them to build their marriages on the ideal of “mutuality,” especially in terms of the household economy.² In this, they were not alone. Many other early nineteenth-century couples spoke in a similar language, and companionate marriage was a concept popular throughout the United States. The critical difference in the border South lay in the fact that residents sought divorces if their marriages failed to adhere to these ideals, refusing to stay in relationships without a sense of mutuality. They embraced all these characteristics of marriages, despite the dangerous individualism implied by mutuality in marriage itself. Individualism, a remnant of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, threatened to tear apart the hierarchical, organic household so central to the white southern way of life. Yet, in these border communities, mutuality became the ideal for many. Young Kentuckians and western Virginians desired and demanded it for themselves, giving power and influence to wives while denying any to their enslaved people. Once again, this border, on the edge of the South and the Midwest, gave birth to both flexibility and rigidity as these couples reshaped one aspect of their households while firmly maintaining another.³

The celebration of domesticity in Kentucky and western Virginian was not confined solely to the female members of the white household. Increasingly in the antebellum era, Kentuckians and western Virginians expressed a desire for men to cultivate their domestic side and to become more involved husbands and fathers. Although this rhetoric was not uniquely theirs, white border southerners nonetheless tried to use it to distinguish themselves from other nineteenth-century American men. They explicitly contrasted their masculine ideal with the failures of plantation southerners’ manhood, describing planters as violent, unemotional—or too emotional. The particular form of masculinity celebrated in the border South had very real implications for border South families, as well as society. It even influenced the political world, as border South white men defended their decisions during the secession crisis by denigrating the “rash” behavior of other white southern men and celebrating their ability to make calm, rational decisions. Understanding domesticity and mutuality is pivotal to understanding white border South identity in the antebellum era. Differing interpretations of masculinity influenced the ways in which white border South men resisted secession.⁴

Yet, too often, the story of domesticity in the United States has been one centered on the middle-class homes of northern New England. There, the “cult of true womanhood” influenced a generation of white women, who saw its core tenets—piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity—as laws structuring their development into housewives.⁵ Early women’s historians argued that the ideology of separate spheres grew out of industrialization in these communities. As men left the home to earn wages, the home became increasingly “private” and feminized, while the public world became more masculine. As women became increasingly associated with this private sphere, their image took on these “soft” characteristics and they earned a monopoly among the sexes on morality and piety. Increasingly, historians have complicated this portrait of the two spheres, demonstrating that both the public and private worlds were porous and overlapping. Others have revealed that white southern women, whose economic worlds were not nearly as industrialized, still valued these feminine values in the early nineteenth century.⁶ The semi-urban communities of the border South provide a middle ground. In the shops and homes of places like Wheeling, Frankfort, and Bowling Green, men and women shared numerous gendered spaces, none of which were purely domestic or economic. This may explain the popularity of mutuality and male domesticity in these places. Even more than in strictly urban, industrial New England homes and large plantations in the Deep South, these homes lent themselves to a more equitable division of labor and a greater appreciation for one’s partner.

At the same moment as the domestic sphere began to gain a mythological status in many middle-class Victorian homes on either side of the Atlantic, men and women increasingly began to value romance. Long based on economic and familial concerns, marriage instead became a matter of individual affection. Companionate marriages, or relationships based on mutual affection and compatibility, became increasingly common after the mid-eighteenth century but exploded in the mid-nineteenth century. As American culture celebrated sentimentality, couples began to assert their desire to find partners that were amiable, well-matched, and affectionate—something very similar to the fictionalized Norman and Monimia described by Ellen Green.⁷ As more couples sought companionate marriages, a new ideal blossomed into fruition—“mutuality.”

Mutuality is a term that sounds almost foreign to twenty-first-century ears. Equality, a modern ideal, makes a lot more sense, both as a concept and as an aspiration for a marriage. Yet, it is anachronistic to look for such traits in most nineteenth-century relationships. Outside of a handful of radical activists, most nineteenth-century spouses could never hope to aspire to equality. Society was not constructed to allow it. Legally and politically, men had all the power. Even men active in the abolitionist or early feminist movements could only gift their wives with the illusion of equality. As Suzanne Lebsock quips, companionate marriages were only as “companionate” as men wanted them to be.⁸ Men still ultimately decided whether they wanted to allow their wives to stand on a similar status to them in the household, and even if they chose this, outside the walls of the home, society and the law placed wives below their husbands regardless of their private relationship. Yet, viewed through nineteenth-century eyes, mutuality seems positively progressive.

Courting men and women in the border South increasingly wrote that they sought a relationship based on “mutuality.” In practice, this was an ill-defined goal, but often it meant that both partners contributed economically to the household, both had important emotional needs, and both needed to be intellectually compatible. A relationship based on “mutuality” acknowledged the identities and desires of both people, something that the law certainly did not do. In most places in the antebellum United States, when a woman married, she lost her legal identity and became feme covert. Her legal identity was literally “covered” by her husband’s. Married women could not own property, write a will, sue, or be sued in court.⁹ In a relationship with mutuality, women were still often subordinate, but they were nonetheless valued. For example, wives’ economic contributions were usually more supportive than contributory. They might build their husbands’ fortunes through their maintenance of the household or through their careful budgeting. “Mutuality” was built on and celebrated gendered differences between men and women but did give women an authority based on their particular roles as wives. Like the celebration of female domesticity in the nineteenth century, society’s embrace of mutuality could lead to an expansion of women’s rights, if not for fully progressive reasons. In New England, for example, many women leveraged their new status as domestic queens to join reform movements, including temperance, abolition, and, eventually, suffrage.

However, in a society structured upon racial slavery, even something as innocuous as “mutuality” could prove threatening. White southerners valued hierarchy throughout society. Clearly, racial hierarchy formed the backbone of plantation society, but households also featured a strict gender hierarchy as well. Men were the masters of these so-called small worlds, dominant over both their slaves and their families.¹⁰ All of these elements of their mastery were intertwined, and chipping away at one endangered the other. Because of this, mutuality in relationships held far less appeal in slaveholding society than in nonslaveholding society. Yet, these slaveholding communities also lay on another, more neglected border—that between East and West. Border southerners’ embrace of mutuality reflects their absorption of a streak of antihierarchical sentiment from their midwestern neighbors. Therefore, even in the heart of slaveholding Kentucky and western Virginia, mutuality struck a chord, especially since it applied to the white members of the household.¹¹ This ideal reflected a hesitant progress and perfectly encapsulates the flexible and contradictory identities of border southerners during this era.

Before marriages could reflect the acceptance of mutuality in the border South, white men and women had to find partners who would fulfill this goal. Although most courting couples spent little time alone to determine their compatibility, many poured their feelings onto the page, shedding light on their new demands and aspirations for a marriage partner. As it was throughout the early United States, courtship in the border South was a ritualized process with fairly strict social norms. Most white men and women who fell in love and married either knew one another through family or childhood friends or met at parties, church socials, and on summer visits throughout the region. Once a proper introduction had been made, they courted under the watchful eye of their parents and community, sometimes escaping for a private walk or buggy ride. Often the only place to find any semblance of social intimacy was in correspondence, though even in letters certain proprieties had to be observed. Especially when men and women lived apart, letters were vital to a relationship and allowed romantic affection to blossom.¹²

In Kentucky and western Virginia, courting men and women sought mutuality in their relationships and spent pages assuring their lovers that they would strive to maintain such a goal in their marriage. In the midsummer months of 1841, Edward Bennett of Louisville, Kentucky, wrote to his fiancée, Judith Bellestine of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about his excitement over their upcoming marriage. “I believe fully, my dear Judith, that it will contribute greatly to our mutual happiness,” he told her. “I feel abundantly satisfied that my own happiness will be greatly enhanced by the society of my dear friend whom I ardently love.” Edward, like many young Kentucky men, believed that his marriage would be a source of happiness for both himself and his wife and sought a friend, rather than a subordinate, to make this possible. He saw his wife as a companion and a partner.¹³

This is not to say that border South men did not consider other characteristics besides love in a future mate, but affection soon came to feature most prominently alongside others in their letters. Young William Johnson wrote to his mother before his 1860 wedding: “I think I am about to marry as noble a lady as I have ever seen, but who will make a gentle, affectionate, sensable, and good wife.” Not unconcerned about worldly matters, he admitted that he wished “for her sake” that she had property but concluded that he would marry regardless of her financial background. Ultimately, he told his mother, “I have always desired to marry for happiness, not for money.”¹⁴

Other smitten suitors felt the same way. In a letter to his sister, Phoebe, in August 1836, Will Coburn, a Kentuckian, described his feelings for Sue Ballinger. “Her condition in life I considered on a par with my own,” he told his sister. Sue and Will had comparable family and economic backgrounds, as well as similar “dispositions.” But most importantly, he wrote, “I had loved Sue from childhood up. It was not a burning impetuous love that I had for her, but unlike any other attack of the kind I have ever had it was ardent, yet cool and reflective.”¹⁵ This love made his courtship honorable and worthy and convinced him that Sue was the best possible wife for him. While many other nineteenth-century men may have shared these attitudes, border southern men imagined their beliefs to be unique, a reflection of the way they envisioned their larger relationship with New England, the South, and the Midwest. Will, like many other border South men, emphasized the emotional rationality of his feelin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Blended Family
• Part 1. Before the Storm
• Part 2. Weathering the Storm
• Conclusion: A Complicated Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index