Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Extract

In the spring of 1866, Congress enacted civil rights legislation that extended the right to contract to all formerly enslaved people. The implications of this measure reverberated well into the twentieth century. Indeed, nearly one hundred years later, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report on the state of African American families, which reinvigorated racialized views of black marriage, and emphasized gendered pathologies of marital instability (p.19). In Bound In Wedlock, Tera W. Hunter joins a revisionist canon that directly challenges the Moynihan Report’s conclusions. Her important study carefully probes the complexity of African American marriage, covering a breadth of transformations that occurred over the long nineteenth century. As she contends, American racism shaped the legal contours of black marriage in ways that forced the most intimate matters into the national spotlight. Nonetheless, African American marriages proved adaptable and supple, as husbands and wives navigated the realities of slavery and the discriminatory policies that shaped freedom.