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Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the US. Enslaved African Americans were legally considered chattel, and they were denied civil and political rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people. [1]
[Slaves] are men, but they must not read the work of God; they have no right to any reward for their labor; no right to their wives; no right to their children; no right to themselves! The law makes them property and affords them no protection, and what are the Christian people of this country doing about it? Nothing at all!
Slave codes, federal and state laws that controlled African Americans' legal status and condition, started with legislation in 1705. They were treated like other forms of property, like farm equipment, cows, and horses. Enslaved people were prohibited from entering civil contracts and could not legally own or receive real or personal property. Their slavers legally owned anything an enslaved person possessed. They were denied civil and political rights and the ability to plan their own time and movement. After a number of slave rebellions it was made illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write. [1] The Supreme Court of the United States supported the principle that enslaved people were not entitled to constitutional protection because, as chattel property, they were not citizens of the United States in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1856. [2]
In the Northern United States, some states legalized marriages between enslaved people. In New York, bondsmen and women were allowed to marry, and their children were legitimate with the passage of the Act of February 17, 1809. Tennessee was the only slave state that allowed for marriage among enslaved people with the owner's consent. Instead of being chattel, Tennessee recognized the personhood of enslaved people, who had a legal status of being "agent[s] of their owners". [3]
Enslaved men and women entered into relationships with one another based on the knowledge that meaningful relationships were important to their survival. Initially, enslaved people formed relationships according to the customs of West Africa. [4] There was an expectation of love, affection, and loyalty. [5] "Marriage" between enslaved people reflected a chosen emotional bond and a committed marital relationship. Being in a quasi-marital relationship affected one's status in the community and helped define the nature of the relationship among those in black and white communities. [5] One of the strongest arguments against slavery is that it made managing marital and family relationships challenging. [4]
Unions involving an enslaved person or people were not legally binding. [6] Couples who were emancipated might have their marriage solemnized, which made their children legitimate. [7] Clerks were prohibited from issuing marriage licenses or recording marriages. In some places, ministers were prohibited from performing marriage ceremonies. [8] A long-term relationship with an enslaved person was often called a marriage, but it was a contubernium or quasi-marital relationship. [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. Because they were considered to be chattel, they had no legal standing. Their slavers made decisions about their lives, which meant they did not have a sense of permanence when entering a committed, intimate relationship. [9] The church did not sanction quasi-marriages and thus was at odds with the teachings of the Christian church regarding the roles of wives, husbands, and children. [10] The longer an enslaved couple and their children were together, the more likely slavers would separate them. 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). [11] Interstate slave trade increased to meet the varying needs of planter's crops. For instance, sugar plantations primarily operated with enslaved males because the work was so strenuous. The domestic slave trade disrupted one-third of first marriages by separating partners. Relationships also suffered when family members were hired-out to other slavers for the long term. [12]
Within African American communities, couples who entered into unions were considered married. [13] Marriages could be established as simply getting slavers' permission and sharing a cabin. [14] If they shared vows, the wording had to be modified. 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. For instance, "til death do us part" was revised to "til death or buckra part you", the term "buckra" meaning "the white man", or "til death or distance do you part". [15]
Rarely, domestic servants might have formal marriage ceremonies performed by a black plantation preacher or a white minister. After honoring the couple, a feast and dance might follow. Such events were rare in general, and when they occurred were more likely held for house servants. [14]
Jumping the broom was a ceremony ritual conducted for an enslaved couple. The practices varied. In some cases, the broom was held about a foot off the ground, and each partner jumped backward over the broom. Another practice was to have two brooms; each partner jumped over a broom while holding hands. The ritual helped couples feel "more married". [14]
Slavers controlled quasi-marital unions and could decide the fate of husbands, wives, and children at any moment. [4] Slavers decided whether families lived together, if they were sold away from one another, or if or when they could see one another. [13] [14] If the couples lived on different plantations, they were said to have a "broad" or an "abroad" marriage. [14] [16] Even though they committed to one another, they were not necessarily allowed to live together. [17] Depending upon the distance, they might visit one another on the weekend or stay with each other nightly. For slavers, broad marriages could make the management of productivity and the control of resistance more challenging if they became increasingly independent. [14]
Slavers might encourage marriages between black men and women on their plantations. A wealthy owner might buy the spouse of a broad marriage so that they would live together on their estate. [14] Slavers learned that it was in their best interest for their enslaved workers to be married and have families. It meant that enslaved people would be mollified and less likely to run away. [4]
A slaver could permit a couple to have a relationship, essentially providing approval to breed, which would increase the number of people they enslaved and make more money for the slaver. [18] Enslaved women, whether married or not, were subject to rape by their owner, who benefited financially by fathering several children with greater control as the biological father. [19]
Historian Eugene Genovese argues that slavers understood the strength of enslaved peoples' marital and family ties: "Evidence of the slaveholders' awareness of the importance of family to the slaves may be found in almost any well-kept set of plantation records. Masters and overseers normally listed their slaves by households and shaped disciplinary procedures to take full account of family relationships. The sale of a recalcitrant slave might be delayed or avoided because it would cause resentment among his family of normally good workers. Conversely, a slave might be sold as the only way to break his influence over valuable relatives." [20]
Some men and women lived with their children in nuclear families. In most cases, enslaved fathers did not live with their families. In many ways, enslaved couples assumed typically female and male roles within the relationships, except that since their children and wife were subject to slavers' whims, men had less control in the care of their family than free men with free family members. [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. He could not control their fate, what work they performed, or their privileges. [22]
Enslaved men hunted, fished, and raised crops, poultry, and livestock to feed their families. They might also perform "overwork" tasks that provided their families with a better standard of living. [23]
According to the law ( partus sequitur ventrem ), children born to an enslaved woman were the property of her slaver. [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. He was sent to work at a tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia owned by the son of his former owner. Brown had believed that he was to be freed upon his slaver's death. [26]
The Thirteenth Amendment emancipated enslaved people, who were thus no longer considered chattel. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 defined the rights of free people to own, sell, or lease personal and real property, enter into contracts, and be entitled to fundamental human rights. They could also marry. [2] After the Civil War, states defined how to evaluate whether long-term couples were married and what rights they had as married couples within their jurisdiction. [27]
After the end of the Civil War, freed men and women searched for family members that slavers had separated from them. In their search, they walked long distances and contacted many agencies. [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. [28] One of the fundamental rights that freed men and women chose to exercise was the right to marry, resulting in a plethora of African American marriages soon after the end of the war. There were a few, though, that felt that they were being forced to marry by missionaries or were concerned about obligations that they might be unknowingly taking on. [4]
President Andrew Johnson hired Major General Oliver Otis Howard on May 30, 1865, to be the commissioner of the Freeman's Bureau, to aid in the Reconstruction of the District of Columbia, Confederate states and free states that bordered slave states. They worked in camps established by the military for formerly enslaved people. Associate commissioners were responsible for hiring officers to record former slave marriages. Ordained ministers provided records of marriages that they had performed and solemnized other marriages. [14]
The Bureau recorded marriages and preserved marital records of former enslaved men and women in registers, certificates, marriage licenses, and other records. States and other organizations also formalized long-term relationships. [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. Marriage had become a moral and legal requirement for blacks in American society. [29] Unaware of legal ramifications, some African Americans who had been in quasi-marriages were prosecuted for choosing a different partner to legally marry once they were free. [30]
Ellen and William Craft were both born into slavery and were separated from their parents at a young age. They cared for one another, but they would not enter into a marriage that would mean that she would bear a child who would be born into slavery. They hatched a plan to seek freedom. 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. They successfully fled slavery and lived as man and wife. [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. The Greens were freed by William Bent, brother of Charles, in 1847. They then headed east back to Missouri. [32]
Emeline and Samuel Hawkins, an enslaved woman and a freed man and sharecropper, considered themselves a married couple. They lived together with their children. Their two eldest children were sold away from the family in 1839. Samuel had tried unsuccessfully to purchase the freedom of his wife. Four more children were threatened with being sold away from the family. With Samuel Burris, Samuel Hawkins planned his family's escape. The family made it to Byberry Township, Pennsylvania, where they changed their last name to Hackett. They reunited with their eldest sons, Chester and Samuel, who were apprentices in the area. [33]
Sarah Ann and Benjamin Manson were an enslaved couple from Wilson County, Tennessee. They lived as man and wife since 1843 and had sixteen children. They were legally married on April 19, 1866, and received a marriage certificate from the Freedmen's Bureau. The certificate symbolized their right to live together as a family. [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. Newer scholarship and review of enslaved person and census records in Loudoun County, Virginia has shown a greatly diminished role of the husband and father in enslaved families, who were unable to be the leader for the family, according to Brenda E. Stephenson. Often, mothers headed the family on plantations and had "abroad" spouses who lived on other plantations. Consequently, an enslaved man might have intimate relationships with more than one woman. [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. When slavers split families apart, historical records showed a significant effort among Blacks to reunite families. It remains an open question among historians regarding the extent to which the interstate slave trade destroyed slave families. [23]
Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between two people in which the couple does not want to, or cannot, enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar, but mutually exclusive.
Jumping the broom is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings.
Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavement is the placement of a person into slavery, and the person is called a slave or an enslaved person.
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is still legal in the United States.
"Children of the plantation" is a euphemism used to refer to people with ancestry tracing back to the time of slavery in the United States in which the offspring was born to black African female slaves in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Non-Black men, usually the slave's owner, one of the owner's relatives, or the plantation overseer. These children were often considered to be the property of the slave owner and were often subjected to the same treatment as other slaves on the plantation. Many of these children were born into slavery and had no legal rights, as they were not recognized as the legitimate children of their fathers. The men who fathered these children often used their power and authority to force themselves upon the black females who were under their control.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the Middle Passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa. Systems of servitude and slavery were once commonplace in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the rest of the ancient and medieval world. When the trans-Saharan slave trade, Red Sea slave trade, Indian Ocean slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the pre-existing local African slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa. Slavery in contemporary Africa is still practised in some parts despite it being illegal.
Slavery in New France was practiced by some of the Indigenous populations, which enslaved outsiders as captives in warfare, until European colonization that made commercial chattel slavery become common in New France. By 1750, two-thirds of the enslaved peoples in New France were Indigenous, and by 1834, most enslaved people were African.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for slave owners to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the full title of which is the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, is a 1956 United Nations treaty which builds upon the 1926 Slavery Convention, which is still operative and which proposed to secure the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade, and the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, which banned forced or compulsory labour, by banning debt bondage, serfdom, child marriage, servile marriage, and child servitude.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
John Punch was an Angolan-born resident of the colony of Virginia who became its first legally enslaved person in British colonial America.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
The ownership of enslaved people by indigenous peoples of the Americas extended throughout the colonial period up to the abolition of slavery. Indigenous people enslaved Amerindians, Africans, and—occasionally—Europeans.
In ancient Rome, contubernium was a quasi-marital relationship between two slaves or between a slave (servus) and a free person who was usually a former slave or the child of a former slave. A slave involved in such a relationship was called contubernalis, the basic and general meaning of which was "companion".
Emily Saunders Plummer was an American slave from Prince George's County, Maryland. She married a slave from another plantation, Adam Francis Plummer, on May 30, 1841. The two of them had nine children and spent much of their marriage attempting to prevent the family being separated through sale. After failing to do so previously, Emily managed to escape from her master, taking five of her children with her, in October, 1863. After spending time in a Baltimore jail, Emily and her children were able to reunite with the rest of the family in Riverdale. She ultimately contracted pneumonia and died on January 17, 1876.
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