Slave marriages in the United States

Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the US.

Slave codes, federal and state laws that controlled African Americans' legal status and condition, started with legislation in 1705.

Enslaved people were prohibited from entering civil contracts and could not legally own or receive real or personal property.

[8] Unlike white couples, enslaved people did not have the protection of the law, the sanctity of the church, or the greater community's support to foment successful marriages.

Their slavers made decisions about their lives, which meant they did not have a sense of permanence when entering a committed, intimate relationship.

This was particularly the case after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect on January 1, 1808, coupled with the cotton economy that drove the acquisition of enslaved people in the Deep South (at about the same time that tobacco farms in the Upper South transitioned to an economy based upon crops like wheat and corn that required fewer enslaved workers).

The vow, "To have and to hold, in sickness and in health... til death do you part", was revised to reflect slavers' legal right to separate them.

[15] Rarely, domestic servants might have formal marriage ceremonies performed by a black plantation preacher or a white minister.

For slavers, broad marriages could make the management of productivity and the control of resistance more challenging if they became increasingly independent.

Masters and overseers normally listed their slaves by households and shaped disciplinary procedures to take full account of family relationships.

[21] In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville found there was a "profound and natural antipathy between the institution of marriage and that of slavery" because a man could not be an authority figure to his wife and children.

[14] In many jurisdictions, once enslaved people in long-term relationships were emancipated or manumitted, their marriages were recorded, and their children were deemed legitimate.

[24] She would take me upon her knee and, pointing to the forest trees which were then being stripped of their foliage by the winds of autumn, would say to me, my son, as yonder leaves are stripped from off the trees of the forest, so are the children of the slaves swept away from them by the hands of cruel tyrants; and her voice would tremble with deep emotion, while the tears would find their way down her saddened cheeks.

On those occasions she fondly pressed me to her heaving bosom, as if to save me from so dreaded a calamity, or to feast on the enjoyments of maternal feeling while se yet retained possession of her child.When he was 15 years of age, Henry Box Brown was separated from his mother, father, brothers, and sisters upon his slaver's death.

[27] After the end of the Civil War, freed men and women searched for family members that slavers had separated from them.

[4][28] They followed the routes of former slave traders, contacted churches, and reached out to Freedmen's Bureau to locate their spouses that they might not have seen for years.

[14] Ironically, blacks were prevented from obtaining legal marriages while enslaved, but they were "disproportionately punished" if they lived together without being married once they were free.

Ellen had a fair complexion, like her father, so she dressed up as a male slaver who traveled with William, who played the role of her slave.

[31] Charlotte and Dick Green were integral to the successful operation of Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe Trail.

Still, they remained enslaved until Dick was rewarded for his participation in the military party sent out to avenge the death of Governor Charles Bent of the territory of New Mexico.

[32] Emeline and Samuel Hawkins, an enslaved woman and a freed man and sharecropper, considered themselves a married couple.

[14][34] Since the mid-1970s, some historians—like Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame, Jacqueline Jones, Ann Malone, and Eugene Genovese—have contended that most slave children grew up in homes with both parents.

[23] According to Herbert Gutman, a slave register from a South Carolina plantation over almost 100 years shows that there were long-standing marriages between enslaved men and women.

He found examples of long-term marriages in other states, like Virginia, northern Louisiana, North Carolina, and Alabama.

[35] Slavers further separated families by trading them to the Deep South and Southwest in the years preceding the Civil War.