Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War

Abstract

In Marriage on the Border, Allison Dorothy Fredette explores how social values among white households and families in border Southern states did not fully adhere to norms common throughout the slave South. By tracing how these values manifested themselves in divorce records during the Civil War era, Fredette emphasizes that Southern gender norms were hardly monolithic. Her study of marriages and marital roles in white families in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia reveals a world where “mutuality, love, and respect” shaped relationships (p. 9). Fredette's book is carefully framed and deeply researched. Instead of writing broadly about the entire region, she dives deeply into four counties to represent the border South—Ohio and Tazewell in western (later West) Virginia and Franklin and Warren in Kentucky. She examines Fauquier and Amelia Counties in Virginia as representative of the slaveholding South. By narrowing her focus on a relatively small geographic area, Fredette is able to mine the divorce records for each of the counties, augmenting them with a wide array of diaries, personal correspondence, speeches, and prescriptive literature.