“An illicit and criminal intercourse”: adultery and marital breakdown in the slaveholding South

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines divorce petitions filed by white southern women in the nineteenth-century slaveholding South that specifically cited “adultery” or “illicit relations” between their husbands and Black enslaved women as a reason for seeking a dissolution of marriage. White women have until fairly recently been exonerated from blame in slavery, seen as either benevolent bystanders to the worst excesses of slavery, or at least partial victims themselves within the matrix of uneven gender relations in marriage. Yet increasingly more evidence has shown that white slaveholding women, wielded “soft power” in their own right. They manipulated their reputations as “good southern wives and mothers” to win the favour of the courts by discrediting their wayward husbands and the enslaved women with whom they engaged in sexual relationships in their divorce petitions submitted to the higher authority of the courts. This often resulted in their petitions being granted and alimony awarded, which enabled them to support themselves and their children as single women. The court petitions thus provide vital evidence in further understanding how race, class, and gender interacted, to provide a measure of agency for some white women whilst reinforcing the constraints of negative gendered racial stereotypes for Black, enslaved women.