Few social institutions were of greater importance to antebellum Americans than marriage and family. Though the United States was comprised of different cultural groups holding different beliefs, the basic family structure was valued by many of these communities. Marriage is basically a contractual agreement between consenting individuals, but the individual roles assigned to man and wife were closely prescribed and virtually unalterable from a legal standpoint. States, which had a vested interest in the survival and regulation of marriage, concocted legislation to reinforce existing norms.
Several hundred Native American nations existed in North America in the 19th century, and each held a set of culturally specific beliefs about family. Family was defined by reference to the taboos, rights, privileges, and respect owed to members of an individual’s household, clan, moiety, or band. Residency patterns emphasized the expansive nature of such kinship systems. While husbands and wives in some northern and western nations maintained their own homes, most Native American households consisted of extended family groups, including married couples and their brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, and children. Some cultures allowed men to marry several wives; a handful permitted women to do the same in reverse. Multiple marriages were usually a sign of a household’s high status or rank, indicating the family’s wealth as well as its obligation to provide hospitality and support to others in the community. Child care was usually a shared responsibility. Among the nomadic bands of the northern plains, for example, grandparents took particular responsibility for childcare, freeing their own adult sons and daughters to engage in the labor necessary to maintain the economic health of the nation.
Clan membership linked men and women together across household and community lines. Individuals were
Prohibited from marrying members of their own clan, so each household would contain representatives from at least two. Clan obligation resulted in a network of father and mother figures in every child’s life. Among matrilin-eal societies such as the Hopi of the Southwest, for example, children traced their clan membership through their mother. While their biological father had a significant place in their life, children considered their mother’s brothers of equal importance, especially in learning clan-appropriate behavior.
For most Native American groups, kinship was not limited to relationships between humans. The physical world in which communities existed, the animal and plant life found there, elements such as wind and water, and manifestations of the spiritual world were frequently addressed in kinship terms such as father, mother, grandparent, or cousin. Taboos, traditions, and rites governed these relationships as much as those between the human members of an individual’s nation.
Kinship practices became a major source of conflict between Euro - and Native Americans as the 19th century progressed. (This despite the fact that Europeans and Native Americans had been intermarrying on the frontier for at least two centuries with little fanfare, and that their offspring, steeped in either culture, invariably enjoyed useful employment as translators and facilitators.) To many non-Indians, the observation of extended kinship, the recognition of obligation beyond the nuclear family, and female-centered households represented moral, economic, and political disorder. Missionaries, government officials, and voluntary organizations all considered the reorganization of family structures to be central to “civilizing” Native Americans. These groups brought pressure to bear on Native communities through the establishment of churches and schools, the provision of domestic goods and agricultural equipment in treaty settlements, and the administrative regulations of government agencies. These efforts would culminate in the Dawes Act of 1887, which divided reservations into individual parcels of land to be distributed to households that reflected EuroAmerican definitions of “family.” Many Native kinship systems were drastically disrupted by such practices, yet family also became the locus of resistance and cultural continuity. The recognition of extended kinship ties and responsibilities survives among Native communities to this day.
For enslaved men and women, the creation and maintenance of family was a complex endeavor. Anglo-American law classified slaves as property, lacking the legal capacity to enter into contracts. Committed relationships between enslaved men and women were therefore never recognized as marriage by law. Without this legal protection, parents and children could be sold or traded away from one another without any consideration to family ties. Working and living conditions compounded the difficulty of this situation. Many parents lived on neighboring but separate farms and plantations. Enslaved women were often the targets of sexual abuse by the men who owned them, and their children were considered slaves even if the father was free. Poor nutrition and heavy labor during pregnancy caused many women to miscarry, while numerous children died in infancy for want of food and medical care. Those children who survived were put to work at a very young age.
Yet enslaved men and women resisted the attempts of individuals and institutions from outside the slave community to define (or undermine) their idea of family. Enslaved families were variously united through African tradition, Christian belief, and the everyday exchange of neighborly obligation and support. Blood relations, sexual companions, neighbors, and friends could all be counted as family, and kinship traced through mothers as much as fathers. Customs such as “jumping the broom” solemnized marital relationships even as federal or state law denied their legality. Family provided enslaved Americans with the opportunity to forge an identity separate from that ascribed to them by the law. These kinship ties would ultimately survive the rigors of the institution that bound them and sustain the African-American community through the dislocations of the Civil War and the national upheaval that marked Reconstruction.
Interracial marriages were another point of contention in the highly charged racial atmosphere of 19th-century America. Such unions were far from rare in places such as French and Spanish Louisiana, where little stigma was attached among the Creole population. As the century progressed, however, more and more states forbade interracial unions, and antimiscegenation legislation reached its peak during Reconstruction. Farther west, similar state statutes were adopted to prevent black-white and Indian-white marriages, as well as marriages between whites and newly arrived Asians. In 1855 Congress joined the rising tide of intolerance by passing a law that granted citizenship to all foreign women who married American men, provided that they were neither of African nor Asian descent.
For free people, Anglo-American common law governed the form and function of family life and prescribed specific responsibilities for husbands and wives. Upon marriage, women surrendered most of their legal capabilities to their husbands. Husbands controlled their wives’ property, any income they earned, their ability to sue, their ability to contract, and sexual access to their body. Wives who committed a crime, signed premarital agreements, had trusts created in their name, or appealed to a court with equity jurisdiction could find exceptions to this general rule. In the words of English jurist Sir William Blackstone, however, a wife was ideally considered to be under the legal “wing, protection, and cover” of her husband during marriage. Men, in turn, were expected to provide economic support to their wives, and act as their representatives in political matters.
Throughout the 19th century, courtship rituals were an essential precursor to legal union. In middle-class white culture, courtship entailed the notion of romantic love and wooing, but overt sexual relations were deplored. Contact between males and females, when it occurred at all, took place in a controlled setting with little opportunity for intimacy. This was a radical change from earlier notions of sex: In colonial and 18th-century America, one in three brides was pregnant. For most of the 1800s, restraints on sexual contact reduced the number of pregnant brides to roughly one in five. Parents played a small but significant part in the process, as it was usually deemed necessary for the would-be groom to get the approval of the bride-to-be’s father. Courtship involved the newly developed practice of giving an engagement ring to one’s betrothed and the now-common bridal custom of wearing a white veil and gown during the marriage ceremony. Urban and southern whites were less likely to observe any of these formalities, however. More frequently than their peers elsewhere in the United States, unmarried couples engaged in public displays of affection that culminated in common-law marriage.
Marriage was meant to be a lifetime contract. While divorce did exist within the American legal system, it was not intended to remedy general unhappiness. Instead, the law’s function was to protect “innocent” husbands and wives from moral or physical abuse by their partners. A husband or wife who committed adultery, for example, was considered to have revealed their fundamentally immoral character. As such, it was only proper that their blameless spouse should be able to petition for a divorce, and dissolve the connection between them. Should both partners commit adultery, however, their moral characters were considered equally blemished, and their petition for divorce was likely to be denied. Couples who actively worked together to try and arrange the dissolution of their marriage were similarly penalized. Collusion was one of the primary reasons that legislatures and judges turned down petitions for divorce.
Faced with an inflexible legal system, many husbands and wives chose to separate rather than seek a divorce. Separation was a common occurrence for even the happiest couples in the 19th century, as war, financial crises, and the search for work forced many husbands and wives to spend months, even years, apart. For couples who had come to the conclusion that they could not happily live together, however, separation offered relief where the law could not. Some spouses fled, abandoning their families to move to a different state and begin again. Others did their best to formalize the process through separation agreements, documents that were generally unenforceable at law but laid out the terms and conditions by which unhappy husbands and wives would try to live. Such agreements often contained financial provisions and made custodial arrangements for children.
Over time the American legal system did make room for formal changes in the institution of marriage. From 1839 onward, states and territories passed a series of married women’s property acts, allowing women to retain ownership of their property even after marriage. These acts were not intended to equalize the position of men and women within marriage but to offer some relief to families hit hard by the PANIC OF 1837. By allowing a married woman to own property separately from her husband, legislators prevented a wife’s assets from being seized to pay for her husband’s debts. Over the course of the 19th century, divorce also became easier to obtain, with states such as Indiana and Utah gaining a reputation for allowing couples to divorce on a whim. While the reality was less titillating, many states and territories did add to the grounds on which couples could petition for the dissolution of their marriage. South Carolina, however, did not sanction divorce until 1868.
Anglo-American law dealt with ideals. Marriage was the taking up of specific responsibilities—the knowing adoption of privileges and obligations, one with the other. Wives were ideally dependent on their husbands, husbands ideally provided for their wives, and once married, they were faithful to one another. Marriage was intended to last for a lifetime, and children were meant to be born within its protective bounds. This legal ideal reflected and supported popular Victorian culture, which idealized the domesticity of women and the economic and political accomplishments of men. It remained, however, a model. For the vast majority of free Americans, it did not describe their daily life.
While husbands and wives regularly adopted different responsibilities within marriage, those obligations were not discrete. In rural America, for example, men and women carried out their marital responsibilities in the same physical space. The house in which women cooked, washed, spun cloth, made soap, and raised children was the same house in which men conducted trade and managed the farm. Husbands, wives, and children were also likely to work alongside each other in planting, raising, and harvesting crops. In the cities, factory owners employed men and women in separate spaces for different tasks, but the low wages earned by most working men made it impossible for them to support a wife and family on their own. The work of maintaining the family economy was a collective venture, dependent on the wages earned by wives and children as well as husbands. The comforts of home were unlikely to be a poorer woman’s primary concern. Even if she possessed the inclination to attain the standards of housekeeping lauded by Victorian culture, her home was likely to be a space shared with other families, without easy access to water, the benefit of a functioning sewer system, or the most basic concepts of privacy.
For wealthier Americans, especially members of the new industrial middle class, husbands and wives did occupy seemingly separate worlds. It was a mark of prestige for a husband to be able earn enough money for his wife and children to stay out of the workforce. Creating and maintaining social prestige was a joint venture, however, reinforced by the labor of wives within their households. Wives stretched their husbands’ financial contributions by their housekeeping skills, and reinforced the reputation of their families as members of the “leisure class” by their modes of dress, fashion, home decoration, and entertainment. While these activities were labor intensive, and helped create and maintain a family’s high social status, they were rarely considered “work.” As America became more and more industrialized, work became synonymous with earning wages, and the labor of wives within the home was increasingly ignored.
Many journalists, educators, members of religious organizations, and everyday middle-class men and women acknowledged there to be a crisis of the family in the 19th century. Birth rates fell, divorce rates rose, middle-class women agitated for the right to enter professions rather than confine themselves to the home, and the practice of POLYGAMY was adopted by the Church of jESUS Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1843. Despite these fears, however, monogamous marriage continued to be the defining act of adulthood for millions of Americans. Family remained important to every community, defined in different times and places in vastly different ways, but in each instance providing the most basic building block upon which society was founded, both for good and for ill.
The rights and obligations of marriage, as disadvantageous as they were to women, did not remain fixed throughout the 19th century. As more and more middle-class women became active in such reforming crusades as temperance and abolition, there arose a cry to end coverture and allow for greater equity in marriage. In 1848 the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention promulgated its “Declaration of Sentiments,” which protested, among other things, the “civilly dead” status of married women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton agitated loudly against women’s second-class status in matrimony, which she maintained amounted to little more than slavery, and in 1848 she convinced the New York legislature to pass laws protecting women’s property from their husbands’ creditors, while simultaneously recognizing women’s right to manage that property. The drive for equality gained traction as the decades passed, and by 1865 no fewer than 29 states had passed laws allowing wives to legally own property in their own names. But the smothering patriarchal imbalance inherent in married life would not be fully addressed by legislatures and courts until the 20th century.
Further reading: Nancy F. Cott, Fuhlic Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Hedrik Hartog, Man & Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Anne C. Rose, Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Leslie Schwalm, “A Hard Fight for We”: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Karen W. Weierman, One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820-1870 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
—Catherine J. Denial
Mason, Richard B. (1797-1850) military officer, governor of California
Richard Barnes Mason was the military governor of California at the time of the California gold rush. Born in Fairfax County, Virginia, on January 16, 1797, Mason was a grandson of the noted constitutional scholar George Mason. He joined the U. S. Army as a second lieutenant in 1817 and made the military his lifelong career.
In 1832 Mason commanded an infantry company during the Black Hawk War. He gained the reputation as a capable and honest military administrator, but also a draconian disciplinarian. In 1833 he was promoted to major in the newly created 1st U. S. Dragoons, the army’s first cavalry unit since the War of 1812. This was considered the army’s elite organization, and selection to command in it was a mark of distinction. In this capacity Mason accompanied many dragoon expeditions into the southern plains to impress upon tribes living there the military power of the United States. Afterward he commanded Fort Gibson in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) for many years.
In 1846 Mason was ordered to New York on recruiting service, and that June he was promoted to colonel of the regiment. He soon set sail on a naval vessel to California, where he was to relieve General Stephen W. Kearny, formerly his regimental superior. Mason arrived in California in November 1846 to find the province in political turmoil. Though the United States had technically conquered California six months earlier, American political authority there had been shattered in a dispute between Kearny and Colonel John C. Fremont, who also claimed to be governor. In May 1847, after the two feuding officers had left
California to settle their dispute, Mason was appointed to replace them as both civil and military governor.
Mason took a conservative approach to governance and allowed the Mexican system of alcaldes (municipal officials) to administer affairs at the local level, although he appointed the majority of them. But governance became greatly complicated by the gold rush of 1849, which prompted a large influx of fortune hunters. The American inhabitants clamored for a civil administration, and his adjutant, Lieutenant Henry W. Halleck, had actually drawn up a law code for the territory. But Mason was reluctant to impose any code of law without congressional approval. Congress, meanwhile, was grappling with whether to even allow California into the Union as a free state, so it never addressed the issue of civilian rule during Mason’s two-year tenure. At length he was replaced by Colonel Bennett Riley and ordered to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. Mason died there of cholera shortly after his arrival on July 27, 1850, an earnest but essentially flawed military administrator.
Further reading: Theodore Grivas, Military Governments in California, 1846-1850 (Glendale, Calif.: A. H. Clark, 1963); Neal Harlow, California Conquered: War and Peace on the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
