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“The Marriage Covenant is at the Foundation of all Our Rights”: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Laura F. Edwards
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Extract

In the fall of 1865, North Carolina lawmakers gathered in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. Despite the absence of the most extreme secessionists, those in attendance were still a remarkably homogeneous group of planters, businessmen, and professionals—white men of the same wealthy families that had always governed the state. Yet faced with the sweeping changes wrought by war and emancipation, they anticipated a difficult session. Edwin Reade, who delivered the opening address, tried to set a positive tone, assuring the assembly that the future would be easy compared to the hardships of the past five years. The metaphor he chose was that of a homecoming. “Fellow citizens,” he intoned, “we are going home”: “Let painful reflections upon our late separation, and pleasant memories of our early union, quicken our footsteps towards the old mansion, that we may grasp hard again the hand of friendship which stands at the door, and, sheltered by the old homestead which was built upon a rock and has weathered the storm, enjoy together the long, bright future which awaits us.”

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Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 81 - 124
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1996

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References

1. Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at its Session of 1865 (Raleigh, 1865), 7. The speech was not only well received but widely complimented. See, for instance, Raleigh Journal of Freedom, 21 October 1865, article reprinted from the Baltimore American.

2. Journal of Freedom, 7 October 1865. Alexander, Roberta Sue, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen: Race Relations During Presidential Reconstruction, 1865–67 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 24–27Google Scholar; Escott, Paul D., Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 124–25Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 112–19.Google Scholar For eyewitness descriptions of the convention, see Andrews, Sidney, The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 119–31Google Scholar; Dennett, John Richard, The South As It Is, 1865–1866 (New York: Viking Press, 1965; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 148–54.Google Scholar

3. For theoretical discussions of the social and political importance of households, see Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Nicholson, Linda, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar For the South in particular, see Bardaglio, Peter, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Bynum, Victoria, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; McCurry, Stephanie, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; id., “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1245–64; id., “The Politics of Yeoman Households in South Carolina,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. Clinton, Catherine and Silber, Nina (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 22–38Google Scholar; Oakes, James, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)Google Scholar; Whites, Lee Ann, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).Google Scholar

4. Using different theoretical frameworks and emphasizing different aspects of life in the slave South, many historians have outlined the various ways in which gender, race, and class shaped private lives and public power in the nineteenth-century South: Berlin, Ira, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1974)Google Scholar; Clinton, Catherine, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982)Google Scholar; Foner, , Reconstruction and Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Ford, Lacy K., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Dur-rill, Wayne K., War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Fields, Barbara J., Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976)Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Holt, Thomas, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar and “‘An Empire over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar; Lebsock, Suzanne, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: Norton, 1984)Google Scholar; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds; Oakes, Slavery and Freedom; Reidy, Joseph P., From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Scott, Ann Firor, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; White, Deborah Gray, Ar'n'tla Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985)Google Scholar; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar For North Carolina in particular, see Bynum, Unruly Women; Cecil-Fronsman, Bill, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992)Google Scholar; Escott, Many Excellent People.

5. Indeed, the North Carolina supreme court viewed family law through the prism of slavery, a perspective that linked the two firmly together. As Victoria Bynum has argued, the state's antebellum supreme court took a dim view of divorce. This was particularly true between 1833 and 1852, when Thomas Ruffin was chief justice. Routinely placing the sanctity of marriage above the happiness of particular individuals, Ruffin believed that the institution grounded the entire social edifice of the slave South. His views on marriage meshed neatly with his paternalistic proslavery philosophy, which defined the household in terms of reciprocal obligations. White women, according to Ruffin, belonged within households as wives, just as African Americans belonged within households as slaves. While bound by responsibilities, wives and slaves could also demand maintenance and protection as an obligation of their husbands and masters. The possibility that marriage could be severed at will introduced contingency into this web of relations. If husbands could easily shed their obligations and wives could easily remove themselves—or be removed—from the household, then there was nothing to keep men and women in their “natural” place. The same logic questioned the “natural” subordination of African Americans. Bynum, “Reshaping the Bonds of Womanhood: Divorce in Reconstruction North Carolina,” in Divided Houses, 322–23. For the connection between the subordination of women in marriage and that of African Americans in slavery, see Bynum, Unruly Women; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds and “The Two Faces of Republicanism” Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 334–71. Also see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3–112.

6. Quoted in Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 99.Google Scholar Also see Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 470–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. For the importance of marriage to a wide range of social relations, see Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household; Cott, Nancy F., “Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in U.S. History as Women's History, eds. Kerber, Linda K., Kessler-Harris, Alice, and Sklar, Kathryn Kish (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 107–21Google Scholar; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Kerber, Linda K., “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (April 1992): 349–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

8. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).

9. For biographical background on Edwin Reade, see Powell, William S., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979–), 5: 183–84.Google Scholar

10. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 ( 1868). For the position of the antebellum North Carolina supreme court on wife beating, see Bynum, Unruly Women, 70–72; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 281–83. Also see Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988)Google Scholar; Pleck, Elizabeth, “Wife Beating in Nineteenth-Century America,” Victimology 4, no. 1 (1979): 60–74Google Scholar; Nadelhaft, Jerome, “Wife Torture: A Known Phenomenon in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Culture 10 (Fall 1987): 39–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Law, Gender, and Injustice.

11. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868). Also see Joyner v. Joyner, 59 N.C. 331 (1862); White v. White, 84 N.C. 340 (1881).

12. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).

13. Although the court later repudiated a husband's right to physically chastise his wife and increased its own powers to intervene in the domestic sphere, it still upheld the separation of private from public established in Rhodes. See State v. Ridley Mabrey, 64 N.C. 592 (1870); State v. Richard Oliver, 70 N.C. 60 (1874); State v. Laura Davidson, 77 N.C. 522 (1877); State v. Simpson Pettie, 80 N.C. 367 (1879); State v. Fred Jones 95 N.C. 588 (1886). Although they did not directly cite Rhodes, other cases supported it in principle. See Martin Horne v. Mary E. Horne, 72 N.C. 530 (1875); Mary A. Miller v. John C. Miller, 78 N.C. 102 (1878); Andrew Syme, Adm'r. v. William D. Riddle, 88 N.C. 463 (1883); State v. Joseph Huntley, 91 N.C. 617 (1884); State v. J.T. Edens, 95 N.C. 693 (1886).

14. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868). Hartog, Hendrik, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America,” Georgetown Law Journal 80 (October 1991): 95–129Google Scholar, also emphasizes the courts' conception of marriage as a public relationship. Nonetheless, the courts were reluctant to interfere in the dynamics of that relationship. Keller, Affairs of State, 467–68.

15. State v. Wesley Hairston and Puss Williams, 63 N.C.451 (1869). For a discussion of the court's regulation of “fit” marital unions in the U.S. as a whole, see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 103–52.

16. Chaplain of a Louisiana black regiment to the regimental adjutant, quoted in Ira Berlin, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 2, The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 624.Google Scholar See ibid., 623 for reference to Special Order 15, which provided for the legalization of slave marriages; for a discussion of marriage, see 660–61. Also see Foner, Reconstruction, 84.

17. Raleigh Daily Record, 13 June 1865. Holden reiterated the point in his address to an 1866 statewide Freedmen's Convention: “The first thing” freedpeople should do “was to get homes [emphasis in original]….” See North Carolina Standard, 17 October 1866. Some white southerners, believing that an altered slave system might survive, began thinking about the issue of slave marriages even before surrender. In January 1865 Governor Vance received a pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on Government, The Marriage of Negroes” from one of his correspondents; see A. McDaniel to Zebulon B. Vance, 10 January 1865, box 183, Vance Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History (NCDAH). The pamphlet echoed arguments from the antebellum period, when the instability of slave family life had come under sharp criticism by some leading lights of the planter class. In 1855 a group of North Carolinians attempted to change the slave code in this regard but had no success. See Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 52–53.

18. For the eagerness of conservative legislators to legalize slave unions, see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 47–48; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 133.

19. Journal of the Convention of the State of North Carolina at its Session of 1865, 41–47 Dennett, The South As It Is, 163–65. After the abolition of slavery, marriage was the first issue involving freedpeople to be discussed by the legislature. Alfred O. Dockery expressed opposition to the marriage statute on the basis that freedpeople would not respect the marital relation anyway. But the primary reason the delegates delayed action was because they wanted to consider marriage as part of an entire code of laws dealing with the status of freedpeople. The question, moreover, was not quite so pressing since General Schofield, the state's military commander, had issued a temporary order that outlined the provisional status of freedpeople. In addition to defining basic rights and labor guidelines, Schofield also allowed for the marriages of freedpeople who requested the ceremony and declared the freed children to be the legal wards and economic responsibility of their parents, whether or not they were married legally. Schofield's guidelines meshed with those in General Order 8, issued the previous month by General Halleck, which laid out the means by which freedpeople in Virginia and North Carolina could legally marry and encouraged local authorities to do so. Significantly, his concerns paralleled those of the delegates to the state constitutional convention. The issue demanded immediate attention, according to Schofield, so that freedpeople would not become a “huge white elephant,” dependent on the state and their former masters for support. See de Roulhac Hamilton, J. G., A History of North Carolina (Chicago and New York: The Lewis Publishing Co., 1919), 3: 148–49Google Scholar; quote from 149. Both Schofield's and Halleck's orders were widely reproduced in many of North Carolina's papers. See, for instance, Daily Record, which reprinted both several weeks running in June and July 1865. The legislature, however, had to write these provisions into the civil code in order to clarify the legal position of freedpeople and to provide for those who refused to marry according to law.

For the tenor of debate among North Carolina's lawmakers during this period, see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen; Escott, Many Excellent People, 85–112. For the South as a whole, see Foner, Reconstruction, 193–95.

20. Objecting to the proposed fifty-cent fee, one legislator advised lowering it to twenty-five cents so as not to discourage freedpeople from legalizing their unions. Another took issue with the statute's wording because it “seemed to distinguish between persons formerly slaves, who had cohabited as husband and wife, under the form or color of marriage rites solemnized by clergymen or Justices of the Peace, and those who had so cohabited without such sanction.” There was no difference between the two, he argued. Neither was a valid marriage and the distinction only detracted from the main point, which was to legalize all slave marriages. For the text of the final bill, see Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866 (Raleigh, 1866), chapter 40, section 5, 100–101; quoted material from 100. For the debate, see Sentinel, 1, 10, 12, 22 February 1866; North Carolina Standard, 7 February 1866. At a time when the state's readmission to the union and the status of freedpeople were topics of continual and heated debate, there was virtual silence on the subject of freed people's marriages both in the press and in the legislature. Although this could suggest the insignificance of the issue, the statements that made it to print indicate a consensus of opinion. All characterized legal marriage among freedpeople as a matter of utmost importance. See, for instance, Daily Record, 4 July 1865; Sentinel, 8, 29 August 1865, 31 January 1866. This is in marked contrast, for instance, with the debate over freedpeople's right to testify in court, which all but eclipsed discussions of the Code's other provisions. Editorializing about the issue, the Sentinel identified the testimony as “the great question of the session”; see 2 February 1866. The evidence supports this conclusion. After days of acrimonious debate, the provision was still contested at the bill's final reading in the House. For a summary of the session, see Sentinel, 1, 2, 9, 22, and 27 February 1866. Governor Jonathan Worth also spoke frequently of the subject in his correspondence; see, for instance, de Roulhac Hamilton, J. G., ed., The Correspondence of Jonathan Worth (Raleigh: The North Carolina Historical Commission; Edwards and Brough-ton Printing Co., 1909), 1: 467, 509, 571–72Google Scholar; Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 3: 154–55. So did common whites; see Dennett, The South As It Is, 132–34, 168–69, 181.

Not all southern states legalized slave marriages from the time of cohabitation or required the registration of marriage, as North Carolina did. Although the acts legitimated the children of slave unions, most states legalized customary marriages from the date their ordinances went into effect, leaving the courts to resolve more of the details concerning the legal status of unions in slavery. See Burnham, Margaret, “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law,” Law and Inequality 5 (July 1987): 187–225Google Scholar; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 133–36, 221–22.

21. Sentinel, 8 August 1865; 31 January 1866. Also see Dennett, The South As It Is, 164–65; Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 47–48.

22. These positions emerged most stridently in the debate over the right of freedpeople to testify in court; see Sentinel, 1, 2, 9, 22, and 27 February 1866. For further elaboration of the conciliatory view, see, for instance, Alfred M. Waddells “Advice to Freedmen,” 8 August 1865; untitled editorial on the status of freedpeople, 21 August 1865; report of the committee, headed by John Pool, that considered the status of freedpeople and advised the appointment of an independent commission to make further recommendations on the matter, 12 October 1865; all in the Sentinel. For the opposing position, see, for instance, “Views of the Late Senator Douglas on the Negro as a Voter,” Sentinel, 15 August 1865. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 40–41; Dennett, The South As It Is, 162–65.

23. Slaveholders made the same claims about slaves; see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 482–83.

24. State v. Young Harris, 63 N.C. 1 (1868).

25. Sentinel, 29 August 1865. This position was also written into the recommendations of the commission, headed by Moore, that drew up the draft of the state's Black Code; see Sentinel, 31 January 1866. Alfred M. Waddell made the same point about marriage in his August 1865 address to freedpeople in Wilmington: “The law will compel you to observe the duties incident to this relation and for any violation of them you will be punished as white people are punished.” See Sentinel, 8 August 1865.

26. Report of the committee, headed by John Pool, that considered the status of freed-people and advised the appointment of an independent commission to make further recommendations on the matter, Sentinel, 12 October 1865.

27. Frances Howard v. Sarah Howard, et al, 51 N.C. 235 (1858). For discussions on the ideological importance of the denial of legal marriage to slaves for southern society as a whole, see Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 32, 52–53; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 129–32; Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, xvi-xvii, 3–39.

28. Sentinel, 29 August 1865. Also see Escott, Many Excellent People, 126–27; Hamilton, A History of North Carolina, 3: 66, 75, 110–11; 4: 13.

29. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866, chapter 40, section 7. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freed-men, 47–48; Gutman, Herbert, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 417–18.Google Scholar

30. The Black Code recognized freedpeople's right to contract and allowed them access to the criminal and civil courts. But within the context of its other provisions and the over-arching assumption that equal access did not mean equality in the eyes of the law, these rights meant little. African Americans were not allowed to testify against whites, except in cases that directly involved their own interests, and they were barred from sitting on juries. The vagrancy section required freedpeople to work and limited their freedom of movement, while other provisions denied them the right to bear arms and encumbered their ability to enter into contracts and to buy and sell property. The terms used to refer to African Americans in the Code suggest its intent. They were “negroes,” “persons of color,” men and women who were “lately slaves,” and “inhabitants of this state.” Not to be confused with citizens, African Americans acquired only the duties and obligations, not the rights of freedom. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866, chapter 40.

31. Quoted in Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 45.

32. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 112–19; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 139–42; Foner, Reconstruction, 201–2; Scott, Rebecca, “The Battle over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina.” Prologue 10 (Summer 1978): 101–13.Google Scholar

33. White resistance to African Americans attempting to reunite their families emphasizes this point; see Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 383–85.

34. As the commission that drafted the Black Code explained: “Prior to the emancipation of slaves, there had existed in the State three classes of population besides Indians, to wit, the whites, the slaves, and the free negroes; and for many purposes, there existed a special legislation for each class. Upon the emancipation of the slaves, the laws especially respecting them, ceased to have any force, and that class fell under the laws respecting free negroes: the political and civil condition of all the colored population became that which had already been established for the free negro. It became the duty, therefore, of the committee to look through the entire body of the laws of the State, for the purpose of ascertaining what part of them governed the free negro, as distinguished from the white man. In performing this duty, your committee have deemed it the more advisable course (as this species of special legislation was scattered throughout the civil and criminal laws) to advise the repeal of all laws that specially affected the colored race, and re-enact such as, in their opinion, ought to exist; and also to recommend other and original legislation, when it was deemed expedient.” See “Report of the Commission, Appointed by Gov. Holden, under an Ordinance of the Convention, to prepare a Code for the Freedmen of this State,” Sentinel, 31 January; continued in 1 February 1866. As Wilson, Charles Brantner argues in The Black Codes of the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965), 13–41Google Scholar, southern lawmakers modeled their states' Black Codes on the antebellum laws relating to free blacks with the express purpose of making the position of exslaves like that of free blacks. For the unwillingness of North Carolina's conservative lawmakers to consider civil and political rights beyond the bare minimum granted them in the Black Code, see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen; Escott, Many Excellent People, 113–35. For the South as a whole, see Foner, Reconstruction, 198–216.

35. For this point, see Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 79–107; Frankelin, John Hope, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 58–120.Google Scholar

36. Foner, Reconstruction, 82–84; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 204–7; Hunter, Tera W., “Household Workers in the Making: Afro-American Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861 to 1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1990, 6–58Google Scholar; Litwack, Leon, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 3–63, 229–47.Google Scholar Questioning the conventional assumption that the North freed the slaves, recent historians have emphasized the active participation of African Americans and the various ways in which they worked to secure their own emancipation: Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience; Berlin, Ira, Fields, Barbara J., Glymph, Thavolia, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 100–130; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 21–23; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 108–35; Schwalm, Leslie Ann, “The Meaning of Freedom: African-American Women and Their Transition from Slavery to Freedom in Lowcountry South Carolina,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1991, 123–81.Google Scholar

37. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 133, makes a similar point about freedpeople using legal marriage “to fortify their domestic relationships with as many legal protections as possible.” The literature on the importance of family ties to slaves and freedpeople is vast. For example, see Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 656–61; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Malone, Ann Patton, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar

38. New York Tribune, 8 September 1865.

39. Register of the Marriages of Free People, vols. 1 and 2, Granville County NCDAH. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 415–16, Gutman estimated the percentage of couples who registered their unions by comparing registered marriages with the slave population aged twenty and over in 1860. Using records from fourteen counties in North Carolina, he concluded that the number of recorded marriages represents about 47 percent of all possible marriages. See note 52 below for further explanation of Gutman's estimates. The number in Granville County comes to 41 percent of the marriageable African-American population, a figure far less than the 70 percent for nearby Warren County, but one that still nears Gutman's average. For the symbolic importance of marriage and its popularity among freedpeople, see Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 660–61 and the documents at 604–5, 623–24, 709–12; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 412–18; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 39–40; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 240–41. Also see Reid, Whitelaw, After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866 (Cincinnati and New York: Moore, Wilstach, and Baldwin, 1866), 126–27.Google Scholar

40. New York Tribune, 8 September 1865. Lumberton minister quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 620n. 35. For similar comments among whites, see Andrews, The South Since the War, 178–79; Dennett, The South As It Is, 164–65. Also see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 241.

41. Quoted in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, eds., The Black Military Experience, 672. Jim Cullen, “‘I's a Man Now’: Gender and African American Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, 76–91, is also suggestive on this point.

42. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 112–19; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 139–42; Foner, Reconstruction, 201; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 402–12; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 153–55; Scott, “The Battle over the Child.”

43. North Carolina Standard, 10 October 1866. Also see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 117.

44. For the demographic and economic structure of Granville County, see Carlson, Andrew J., “Homeplace and Tobaccoland: A History of Granville County,” in Heritage and Homesteads: The History and Architecture of Granville County, North Carolina (The Granville Historical Society, 1988), 27–49.Google Scholar For social and political conflicts during the Reconstruction period, see Edwards, Laura F., “Gendered Strife and Confusion”: Race, Class, Gender, and the Political Culture of Reconstruction in North Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

45. D. A. Yarbrough to H. W. Jones, 3 April 1867, Henry W. Jones Papers, Special Collections Library, Duke University.

46. Assistant Superintendent Thomas W. Hay to Lieutenant Colonel Jacob W. Chur, 25 September 1867, Annual Reports of Operations Received from Staff and Subordinate Officers, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, RG 105, National Archives (BRFAL); the Sub-District of Warren included Warren, Frankelin, and Granville Counties. For examples of complaints in one North Carolina county, see Coleman Edward to the Freed-men's Bureau, 31 July 1866; William Jones to A. G. Brady (regarding the complaint of James Malone) 5 July 1866; Wesley Mayfield to William Jones, 11 May 1866; Letters Received, Assistant Superintendent, Oxford, North Carolina, BRFAL, RG 105. Also see John Washington to Col. Bumsford, 11 September 1867, Assistant Commissioner's Records, BRFAL, North Carolina. For apprenticeship cases in the local court of this same county, see London Brame and wife v. James W. Brame, August 1866; Kate Durham v. H. H. Rowland, August 1866; Unnamed v. Henry J. Hester, January 1867; Robert Hobgood v. Junius Lyon, February 1867; The Court v. Thomas L. Williams, February 1867 (the case was instigated by John Marrow and Fred Malone); The Court v. Hardy Harris, January 1867; Sally Hicks v. Samuel R. Hunt and James R Hunt, February 1868; The Court v. Samuel R. Hunt (a separate charge), February 1868; all in Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH. Apprentice Bonds, Orange and Edgecombe Counties, NCDAH, contain similar cases. For a discussion of comparable litigation in other counties at the local level, see Bynum, Victoria, “On the Lowest Rung: Court Control over Poor White and Free Black Women,” Southern Exposure 12 (November-December 1984): 40–44.Google Scholar Across the state freedpeople deluged the Bureau with complaints; see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 117. So did African Americans elsewhere in the South. See Berlin, Ira, Miller, Stephen F., Rowland, Leslie S., eds., “Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Radical History Reviews 42 (1988): 107–11Google Scholar; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 148–49; Fon-er, Reconstruction, 201; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 402–12; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 34–35. For the development of the Bureau's position on apprenticeship in North Carolina, see Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 112–19; Scott, “The Battle over the Child.” The Bureau's policies elsewhere in the South were similar. See Nieman, Donald G., To Set the Law in Motion: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Legal Rights of Blacks, 1865–1868 (Millwood, New York: KTO Press, 1979), 78–82, 137–38Google Scholar; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 154.

47. Daniel A. Paschall to Major General Miles, 17 September 1867, Letters Received, Assistant Commissioner's Records, BRFAL, North Carolina. Dick Hester v. William S. Hester, November 1867, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH.

48. Coleman Edward to the Freedmen's Bureau, 31 July 1866, Letters Received, Assistant Superintendent, Oxford, North Carolina, BRFAL, RG 105.

49. Bynum, “On the Lowest Rung” and Unruly Women, 103–9. Also see Barbara Bellows, “‘My Children, Gentlemen, Are My Own’: Poor Women, the Urban Elite, and the Bonds of Obligation in Antebellum Charleston,” in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education, eds. Fraser, Walter J. Jr, Saunders, R. Franke Jr, and Wakelyn, Jon L. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 52–71.Google Scholar

50. Quoted in Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 411.

51. Kate Durham v. H. H. Rowland, August 1866 and September 1866; Sally Hicks v. Samuel R. Hunt and James P. Hunt, February 1868, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH. As Herbert Gutman argues in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 409–10, freedwomen in Maryland also couched their demands for their children in terms of their relationship to a competent male household head. Also see Berlin, Miller, and Rowland, eds., “Afro-American Families,” 116–18; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 154–55.

52. Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations,” makes a similar point for the nineteenth century as a whole, noting the disjuncture between individuals' conceptions of marriage and legal definitions. There was, as he argues, a widespread understanding of marriage as an unequal relationship between a husband and wife, in which both parties assumed certain obligations. But the actual operation of that relationship varied widely among individuals and, as I am suggesting here, across race and class as well. Many African-American leaders were quite aware that white northerners and southerners alike used marriage as a barometer of their people's fitness for freedom, and they urged blacks to adopt the domestic patterns common among wealthier whites. This, they argued, would help convince the nation that exslaves deserved the rights and privileges of freedom. See Foner, Reconstruction, 87; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

53. Quoted in Berlin, Ira, Miller, Steven F., Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 2, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 859.Google Scholar Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 415–16. Of course, Gutman's figure is really a “guesstimate.” Comparing registered unions to the entire slave population aged twenty and older presumes that all these people would be married and thus grossly underestimates the percentage of heterosexual couples who formalized their vows. Moreover, there is no way of knowing whether or not existing records are complete. Still, the estimate suggests that many freedpeople did not rush to legalize their marriages, as Gutman himself argues. For the reluctance of freedpeople to marry legally, see Noralee Frankei, “Freedom's Women: African-American Women in Mississippi, 1860–1870,” unpublished manuscript; Schwalm, “The Meaning of Freedom,” 340–44. Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg, 103–11, also notes similar reservations among free black women in the antebellum period.

54. For typical cases of bastardy in one North Carolina county, see Bastardy Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH. The Granville County court records are also filled with fornication and adultery cases, involving both whites and African Americans. The sheer number as well as the repeat offenders suggests that many of these people were involved in long-term relationships. There were fifty-three such cases from 1870 to 1886; see Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH. The Criminal Action Papers in Orange and Edge-combe Counties yielded similar patterns.

55. Torchlight, 20 January 1885, 2 February 1886, 11 January, 15 February 1887; also see 19 April 1887.

56. My analysis relies heavily on Noralee Frankeel's conceptualization of African-American marital relations in “Freedom's Women.” Quotes from Jacob Moore, 14th Regiment, Company A, U.S. Colored Troops, Heavy Artillery; Irvin Thompson alias Cherry Thompson, 37th Regiment, Company K, U.S. Colored Troops, Infantry; both in Pension Records, RG 15, National Archives. Pension records provide an excellent source for the construction of marriage within black communities because widows had to establish the legitimacy of their relationships to claim a pension. Most of the testimony comes from eastern North Carolina, which was occupied early by Union troops. But pension records from other parts of the South are similar, suggesting that these attitudes were widespread. Although she does not draw the same conclusions as Frankel, Schwalm's discussion of African-American families is also suggestive; see “The Meaning of Freedon,” 87–90, 335–49. Also see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 243–44. For parallels between African Americans and nineteenth-century attitudes as a whole, see Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations.”

57. Smith Watkins v. Dink Watkins, Fall Term 1876; E. B. Bullock v. Jane Bullock, Fall Term 1876; both in Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Bigamy cases suggest the same attitude. See: State v. Nash Williams, indictment, 1875; State v. Hinton Jordan, indictment, 1877; State v. Robert Speed, indictment, 1878; State v. Jordan Thorp, indictment, 1878; State v. William Newman, indictment, 1878; State v. Samuel Harris, indictment, 1879; State v. Stephen Blain, complaint and testimony, 1882; all in Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH.

58. For the legal changes in divorce before and after the Civil War in North Carolina, see Bynum, “Reshaping the Bonds of Womanhood,” and Unruly Women, 68–77. While North Carolina appears to have been particularly stringent, it was by no means easy to obtain a divorce in any southern state. Censer, Jane Turner, “‘Smiling Through Her Tears’: Ante-bellum Southern Women and Divorce,” American Journal of Legal History 25 (1982): 114–34Google Scholar; Clinton, The Plantation Mistress, 79–85; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 242–47, 283–91, 300–307. According to Bynum in Unruly Women, moreover, state superior courts often ran counter to the strict statutes and edicts issued by the state supreme court. With greater personal knowledge of the couples, local judges and juries were far more sympathetic and thus more willing to bend the abstractions of the law to fit the complex reality of individual cases.

Although the courts and the legislature liberalized divorce in the postemancipation period, they did so gradually and the changes often benefited men more than women by making it easier for them to sue for divorce. These changes fit into what Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, has called the development of “contractual families” in postwar southern law. Also see Bynum, “Reshaping the Bonds of Womanhood.” In 1870 women were allowed to live apart from their husbands and act as free traders once they had filed for divorce; Public Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1869–70 (Raleigh, 1870), chapter 39, 223. In the legislative session of 1871–72, women who obtained a divorce from bed and board and women who had been abandoned by their husbands were made free traders. This same act affirmed the antebellum grounds for a complete divorce (a vinculo), which was allowed in three instances: if “either party shall separate from the other and live in adultery,” if “the wife shall commit adultery,” or if “either party at the time of the marriage was and still is naturally impotent,” 339. But it liberalized the grounds for divorce from bed and board (a mensa et thoro) by adding habitual drunkenness to abandonment, “maliciously” turning the other out of the house, “barbarous treatment” so as to endanger the life of the other, or “indignities to the person of the other as to render his or her condition intolerable, and life burdensome,” 339. It also provided alimony for the wife, if she was unable to support herself while awaiting the determination of the case if her husband had abandoned her. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at the Session 1871–72 (Raleigh, 1872), chapter 93, 328–43. In 1879 a husband could file for a complete divorce if he discovered that his wife had been pregnant by another man at the time of marriage; Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1879 (Raleigh, 1879), chapter 132, 240. And in 1889 a husband could claim grounds for divorce if his wife refused sexual intercourse with him for twelve consecutive months; Public and Private Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1889 (Raleigh, 1879), chapter 442, 422–23.

59. For a particularly dramatic example, see Child Custody Case of Alphonso Royster, Jr., 1894, Miscellaneous Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Also see Martha E. Satter-white v. William L. Satterwhite, 8 February 1871; Susan Ann Satterwhite v. James A. Satterwhite, 17 September 1859; both in Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. Also see Censer, “‘Smiling Through Her Tears’“; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 244–47, 283–91.

60. Frankel, “Freedom's Women”; also see White Ar'n't I a Woman?, 156–57. Testimony in the Pension Records, as well as the increase in legal divorces among blacks during the late nineteenth century in North Carolina, also suggests that many African Americans moved closer within the orbit of legal marriage as the century progressed. On the increase in divorce, see Bynum, “Reshaping the Bonds of Womanhood.”

61. Frankel, “Freedom's Women,” points out that federal pension examiners had an equally difficult time comprehending the structure of black families in Mississippi. For the importance of extended family ties, see Berlin, Miller, and Rowland, eds., “Afro-American Families” Burton, Orville Vernon, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 237–38Google Scholar, 263–64, 274–79; Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 156; Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making,” 34–38; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Joyner, Charles, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Schwalm, “The Meaning of Freedom,” 87–90, 335–49. Although emphasizing the importance of male-headed, nuclear families, Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom also gives evidence for the importance of extended families. Coleman Edward to the Freedmen's Bureau, 31 July 1866; William Jones to A. G. Brady (regarding the complaint of James Malone) 5 July 1866; Wesley Mayfield to William Jones, 11 May 1866; Letters Received, Assistant Superintendent, Oxford, North Carolina, BRFAL, RG 105. Also see John Washington to Col. Bumsford, 11 September 1867, Assistant Commissioner's Records, BRFAL, North Carolina.

62. State v. Frances Thorp, 1875, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NCDAH. It is unclear whether or not Peter Thompson and his wife were related to Frances Thorp or whether she just referred to them as aunt and uncle. Either alternative, however, supports the importance of an extended family, not based on marriage contracts.

63. Biography of Edward Isham alias Hardaway Bone in the Notebook of David Schenck, David Schenck Papers, NCDAH; Eliza Bell v. John A. Bell, 1871, Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH; Eliza filed her first complaint in 1866 but had to wait several years to legally prove abandonment. Also see Micajah Lancaster v. Unnamed, 1866, Divorce Records, Granville County, NCDAH. In 1835 William Hines also emphasized his wife's fulfillment of her domestic obligations as the underpinning of the marriage when he filed for divorce on the tenuous legal grounds that his wife “utterly neglected to attend to the well management of the kitchen & household affairs and other duties incident to a married woman.” Quoted in Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 144. For Edward Isham, also see Bolton, Charles C., Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 1–10Google Scholar; Culclasure, Scott P., “‘I Have Killed a Damned Dog’: Murder by a Poor White in the Antebellum South,” North Carolina Historical Review 70 (January 1993): 13–39.Google Scholar

64. Benjamin Braddy, Regiment 1, Company F, North Carolina Infantry, Pension Records, RG 15. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 75–81; Hartog, “Marital Exits and Marital Expectations.” The court recognized common-law marriages after the war. See G. P. H. Jones and others v. N. J. Reddick and others, 79 N.C. 290 (1878).

65. State v. Eli Jacobs, 1880, Criminal Action Papers, Orange County NCDAH. In addition to informal mediation by family and neighbors (who were often kin as well), local church congregations also adjudicated family conflicts. Also see Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 133, 156–64; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 171–207. For similar patterns in the urban Northeast, see Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).Google Scholar

66. In the Matter of Harriet Ambrose and Eliza Moore, 61 N.C. 91 (1867).

67. Ibid.

68. Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at the Session of 1866–67 (Raleigh, 1867), chapter 6, 10–11. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen, 50–51.

69. Escott, Many Excellent People; Perman, Michael, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Raper, Horace W., William W. Holden: North Carolina's Political Enigma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).Google Scholar For a blow-by-blow account of the factionalism that developed among North Carolina's white leaders in 1866 and 1867, see Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 3: 176–92. For a revealing portrait of an elite white Republican in Alabama, see Rogers, William Warren Jr, Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).Google Scholar

70. State v. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868).

71. Alexander, North Carolina Faces the Freedmen; Evans, William McKee, Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Escott, Many Excellent People. Also see Ayers, Edwards L., Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Bynum, “On the Lowest Rung”; Foner, Nothing But Freedom; Nieman, Donald G., “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice: Washington County, Texas, 1868–1884,” Journal of Southern History 55 (August 1989): 391–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72. The changes are illustrated well in Miles Mitchell v. Marina Mitchell and her children, 67 N.C. 307 ( 1872). The system, however, lingered in North Carolina and in other parts of the South. See, in particular, Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground, 153–56; Fields, however, maintains that the system continued in a truncated form. In the 1890s it resurfaced again in North Carolina with the “discovery” of the widespread abuse of apprentices by their masters, who worked their charges for their own profit with no thought to the children's well-being. The situation, however, was different from that during the years following emancipation. Although the apprentices were black and badly treated, they were no longer taken from parents to be apprenticed to more “suitable” guardians. See Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of North Carolina for the Year 1888 (Raleigh, 1888), 211–35.

73. Quotes from State v. Richard Oliver, 70 N.C. 60 (1874); State v. Simpson Pettie 80 NC 367 (1879). As Michael Grossberg has argued, northern courts during the antebellum period had taken on broad discretionary powers in issues of family law—what emerged was, in his words, a judicial patriarchy; see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth. While North Carolina courts continued to uphold the patriarchal power of male household heads, they also expanded their power to oversee family relations. Peter Bardaglio makes the same argument for the South in his forthcoming book Reconstructing the Household, highlighting the implications of this development for poor whites and African Americans. The cases dealing with domestic issues are too lengthy to list here; for representative cases that extended the court's control over the private sphere, see: John Beard v. Nicey Hudson, 61 N.C. 180 (1867); State v. A. B. Rhodes, 61 N.C. 453 (1868); State v. Young Harris, 63 N.C. 1 (1868); J. M. Stout v. Daniel Woody, 63 N.C. 37 (1868); State v. Wesley Hairston and Puss Williams, 63 N.C. 451 (1869); State v. Alexander Reinhardt and Alice Love, 63 N.C. 547 (1869); J. J. Biggs v. Jas: M. Harris, 64 N.C. 413 (1870); State v. Ridley Mabrey, 64 N.C. 592 (1870); State v. Johnson Adams and Hagar Reeves, 65 N.C. 537 (1871); State v. Green Brown, 67 N.C. 470 (1872); Miles Mitchell v. Marina Mitchell and her children, 67 N.C. 307 (1872); State v. Nick Alford, 68 N.C. 322 (1873); Martin V. Horne v. Mary E. Horne, 72 N.C. 530 (1875); Elizabeth Thompson v. Elijah Thompson and others, 72 N.C. 32 (1874); James C. Long v. Teresa H. Long, 11 N.C. 304 (1877); State v. Alexander Shaft, 78 N.C. 464 (1878); State v. James Keesler, 78 N.C. 469 (1879); Mary A. Miller v. John C. Miller, 78 N.C. 102 (1878); Jacob Webber v. Rosa Webber, 79 N.C. 572 (1878); Mary Scoggins v. William Scoggins, 80 N.C. 319 (1879); Charles B. Muse v. Cynthia Muse, 84 N.C. 35 (1881); Martha White v. William White, 84 N.C. 340 (1881); State v. Joseph Huntley 91 N.C. 617 (1884); State v. J. T Edens 95 N.C. 693 (1886); Albert D. Johnson v. James I. Allen 100 N.C. 131 (1888). The court, however, kept itself out of the issue of child abuse: State v. Ered Jones 95 N.C. 588(1886).

74. Sarah E. Taylor v. David Taylor, 76 N.C. 433 (1877); In the Matter of Franke Bumpass and Ella Lumsford, Matt Lumsford, and Rosa Lumsford, 1881, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, NCDAH.

75. As soon as Democrats seized control of the state legislature, they moved immediately to restrict democracy at the local level, thus neutralizing Republican influence there. Their handiwork, a new state constitution ratified in 1876, made most county offices appointive instead of elective. By 1878 the Democratic state legislature had selected all the presiding justices in Granville County. Because justices exercised broad discretionary power to accept or dismiss complaints at will, the change in personnel severely limited the access of poor whites and African Americans to the justice system generally. Then, over the remainder of the late nineteenth century, the state legislature slowly expanded the jurisdiction of magistrates. As these Democratic appointees tried an ever-wider range of cases themselves without outside oversight, the legal position of poor whites and African Americans deteriorated still further. Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at its Session 1876–77, constitution, article 4, section 27, 22 and chapter 154, 250–54; Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1879, chapter 92, 174–76; Public and Private Laws of the State of North Carolina, Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1889, chapter 504, 486. Also see Escott, Many Excellent People, 166–70; Perman, The Road to Redemption, 193–220.

76. Sarah E. Taylor v. David Taylor, 76 N.C. 433 (1877).

77. State v. Alexander Neely, 74 N.C. 425 (1876).

78. Ibid. The state supreme court later stepped back from this extreme stance and overturned Neely in State v. James Massey, 86 N.C. 658 (1882). The following year, however, the court returned to a position close to that of Neely in State v. Wiley Mitchell 89 N.C. 521 (1883). Both Massey and Mitchell, moreover, suggest the extent to which the lower courts determined cases according to the principle set out in Neely.

79. Beginning in the late 1870s conservative Democrats in North Carolina argued openly that the interests of poor white and African-American men were dependent on and subsumed by the interests of white elite men. In 1878, for instance, the Torchlight, 9 July 1878, informed African Americans that “those things that make for our peace and happiness in like manner benefit you.” “Our” referred to whites. But the assumption that wealthy whites, not poor whites, would define “our” interests was implicit in this statement. Also see Torchlight, 14 May, 11 June, 23 July 1878, 13 January 1885, 17 August, 12 October 1886. Newspapers across the state carried similar arguments; see Escott, Many Excellent People, 171–95. Also see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.