Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History

Abstract

Love, Marriage, and Civil Rights in African American History Rebecca L. Davis (bio) Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. 404 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Tera W. Hunter’s long-awaited history of marriage among nineteenth-century African Americans illuminates cases of enslavement and emancipation, of citizenship and civil rights, and of national reckoning over persistent racial discrimination. The resulting narrative provides a revelatory work of historical revisionism. Hunter’s book is a signal intervention in the historiography of marriage in the US. Twenty years ago, Nancy F. Cott challenged historians to put marriage’s history at the center of United States history. Her landmark book, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000), asserted that marriage was never simply a private relationship but always reflected the interests of the state and structured the reach of state power into individuals’ personal lives. Since then, the field of marriage history has expanded to include histories of divorce attentive to gender dynamics, marital conflict and the making of gender roles and sexualities, interracial marriage and the creation of categories of racial difference, and the ongoing adaptation of ideas of gendered, racial, and sexual difference within debates over marital rights and pleasures. Within this outpouring of scholarship, only a few books have focused on the experiences of African Americans. In Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2003), Michele Mitchell highlights how marriage and ideals of sexual respectability shaped aspirations for racial uplift. Emily West’s Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (2004) argues for the centrality of male-female couples’ bonds to enslaved people’s lives, even as slavery denied them the legal recognition of marriage. Anastasia C. Curwood’s Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars (2010) focuses on shifting ideals of marital intimacy for African Americans adapting to evolving expectations of marital partnership amid the precarious economic and educational opportunities available to them, particularly in the urban North. [End Page 277] Hunter makes clear that the denial of marriage rights was fundamental to the operation of enslavement, with a legacy of discrimination and family dislocation that endured generations after slavery’s formal end. She argues further that the very denial of marriage rights under enslavement augmented the importance that marriage held for enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans as a symbol of the dignity of full citizenship, and as a benchmark for measuring African Americans’ “progress” toward respectability and socioeconomic stability. Yet marriage could hardly carry that load; it proved to be an inadequate vehicle for civil rights, and it failed to capture the diversity of romantic, parental, and kinship relationships that African Americans nurtured and defended. Bound in Wedlock is the best book on the history of marriage to be published in a generation. In arguing for marriage’s centrality to histories of enslavement, Hunter moves seamlessly among court cases, personal testimonies, social histories of family life under the institution of slavery, and regional histories of slave economies. Central to the book’s success is Hunter’s monumental research to recover the lived experiences of intimacy, family bonds, and kinship among enslaved and free Black people. The voices of enslaved and free people animate nearly every page. Rather than a bird’s-eye view of laws or policies, of court cases or official statements, the book tells stories of individuals struggling with bonds of love, necessity, enslavement, and kinship. While earlier scholars have deftly demonstrated how marriage served as a political metaphor in debates over slavery and women’s rights, and while others have documented patterns in family life and kinship among the enslaved, Hunter weds those two narratives and thus illuminates the connections between them: the political meanings of marriage excluded enslaved people from enjoying its legal protections, enabled slavery’s defenders to justify the separations of families, and made the possibility of legal marriage into a poignant symbol of freedom’s promise. Such an approach proves particularly illuminating when Hunter delves into the complexity of the legal fictions that shaped both slavery and marriage: slavery...