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Mary Beth Sievens, Loren Schweninger. Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 852–853, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.852
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In this intensively researched book, Loren Schweninger examines the circumstances surrounding the dissolution of southern marriages between the 1780s and 1860s. Using petitions presented to state legislatures and cases in chancery courts, Schweninger details the causes of divorce, the process of pleading divorce cases, and the effects of divorce on families and property. Schweninger pays particular attention to the ways that issues of race and slavery were entangled in marital crises, and it is in this area that his book makes its most noteworthy contribution.
Schweninger begins by explaining the changes in legal processes and grounds for divorce in the South throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. As a result of these changes, by the 1850s divorce procedures and policies within the southern states were essentially similar to those in the rest of the nation. Schweninger dedicates the majority of the book to an exploration of the grounds on which white southern men and women petitioned for divorce and the factors—especially gender and class—which affected the outcomes of these cases. The reader learns that men were far more likely than women to accuse their spouses of adultery with slaves and that non-slave-owning men were the most likely group to cite infidelity as grounds for divorce. In turn, women were more likely than men to cite grounds of insanity, drunkenness, abandonment, and cruelty, as courts treated husbands' adultery more leniently than that of wives. Wives experiencing marriage crises struggled with varying degrees of success to protect property they had brought into marriages and to claim property acquired during their marriages. Interestingly, plaintiffs in lower economic brackets (owning no, or fewer than five, slaves) received favorable decrees more often than more prosperous plaintiffs.
