Married Except by Word of Mouth
The terms of marriage among enslaved people in present-day North America varied across regions. During the British colonial era, most of the thirteen colonies did not legally recognize marriage of bondspeople.
But existing sanctions did not mean that enslaved people never married. In 1681, Eleanor Butler, a white servant known as Irish Nell, married “Negro” Charles, an enslaved man, in a wedding ceremony performed by a Catholic priest on a Maryland plantation.67 In Puritan Massachusetts, the quite small enslaved Black population could legally marry. However, as historian Wendy Warren underscores, in New England “even a recognized marriage might not protect an enslaved person from the cruelty of separation from his or her partner.”68 Ultimately, Puritans were seeking profit. When necessary, they did not hesitate to sell members of the few existing enslaved couples. In regions of the present-day United States such as Florida, which remained under Spanish jurisdiction until 1821, the Catholic Church recognized marriage among enslaved people. A comparable context existed in French Louisiana, where the Code noir of 1724 established that enslaved persons of African descent could marry among themselves, even though it prohibited Black persons, regardless of their legal status, to marry people of European descent.69 Not surprisingly, marriage between white persons and Black individuals, regardless of enslaved or free legal status, was prohibited throughout the US South during the nineteenth century.Overall, enslaved people who wanted to marry in colonies where Catholicism prevailed faced similar obstacles. In the Spanish Americas and Brazil, enslaved Black people could marry Black or white free individuals, but as already noted, slave owners established restrictions. Still, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, and consequently the Catholic Church, discouraged marriages between Black persons and Iberian-born men and women or their white descendants, even though such unions were not prohibited.70 In Brazil, for example, white upper-class males who defied the social order by marrying Black freedwomen faced public hostility and met obstacles preventing them from occupying public office and other positions in several other institutions during the colonial period.71 Obviously, local populations contested these written legal prescriptions in the courts and on the ground, especially in the regions where Black people and persons of color outnumbered white people.
Thus, despite the seventeenth-century North American example of Butler and Charles, it is accurate to state that all over the Americas, when marriages between enslaved and free people occurred, grooms were usually free or freed, whereas brides were enslaved. Much more rare were the cases in which free white women married enslaved and freed men.Marriages between freemen and enslaved women posed one major problem for the couple: their children remained enslaved. Often free spouses made attempts to purchase the freedom of their enslaved partners and their children. Historian Tera Hunter, who extensively researched marriage among enslaved people in nineteenth-century United States, uncovered the case of her own ancestor Sally Hunter, who was enslaved and transported from Africa to Jamaica and then to South Carolina. She gave birth to two children, fathered by her owner, but eventually married Dublin Hunter, a freed Black mechanic, who purchased her freedom along with her children. But for many bondspeople, including other members of the Hunter clan, marriage was not a freedom pass.72 Purchasing the freedom of a spouse required resources that took a very long time to obtain.
Because marriage among enslaved people was not legally sanctioned in most of the thirteen British colonies in North America and the later independent United States, formerly enslaved people referred to these unions as “married except by word of mouth.”73 Marriage arrangements varied from region to region, in urban areas and plantation settings, and also over time. For example, in some regions of colonial Virginia, it was common for couples to live on separate plantations, which is why slave households were either composed of a mother and her enslaved children or of all-male members.74 The legal prohibition of the international slave trade to the United States in 1808 and the resultant intensification of the domestic slave trade created growing threats of separation among enslaved families, whose members could be sold to the Deep South where cotton production was flourishing.75 Moreover, as we already explored in chapter 6, when slave owners died or went into debt, enslaved families were often separated.
Marriage among enslaved people did not protect the couple against sexual violence, either, because a slave owner could also directly replace the enslaved husband in the couple’s bed.76 As in other parts of the Western Hemisphere, slave owners often arranged marital unions among bondspeople in colonial North America and the antebellum United States.
Moreover, US slave owners who encouraged enslaved couples to have children did so to increase the enslaved population on their plantations in the context of the second slavery. In some cases, forced breeding was not excluded. Some freedpeople narrated how their owners “mated [men and women] indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions.” According to one enslaved couple who survived the atrocities of slavery in Virginia, “if their master thought that a certain man and woman might have strong, healthy offspring, he forced them to have sexual relation even though they were married to other slaves.”77 Moreover, if the bondspeople resisted his commands, this owner forced them to have sex in front of him. During the nineteenth century, with or without the benediction of Black ministers of various denominations, wedding ceremonies could include rituals such as “jumping the broom” and were often occasions for drinking, dancing, and eating. Yet wedding rites could also be spaces of sexual violence against bondspeople. In one extreme case, a Virginia slave owner declared a bride and groom married after forcing them to have sexual intercourse in front of him.78Attempting to draw broad trends for more than three centuries in an entire continent is a risky enterprise, but it is safe to state that marital unions were more common on plantations where slaveholdings were bigger than on smaller estates with fewer enslaved people. Marriages were also more frequent when the number of enslaved men and women was more balanced. Most marriages tended to occur among men and women living and working on the same estate and owned by the same slaveholder. Yet, many enslaved persons married men and women who lived and worked on neighboring plantations in the United States. Enslaved partners frequently walked several miles to visit their spouses and children on other estates every weekend. When denied the right to these visits, many other enslaved men decided to temporarily escape to stay close to their families.79
Despite all obstacles, marital unions among enslaved men and women took many forms in the Americas.
Enslaved families existed in greater numbers in colonial North America and the independent United States than in Latin America and the West Indies. These discrepancies are in part because of the greater gender balance. Moreover, during the nineteenth century, slave owners in the US South made clear efforts to increase the enslaved population on their plantations. Working conditions on cotton plantations were better than in the sugar estates. Especially starting in the nineteenth century, after the importation of enslaved Africans to the United States was prohibited in 1808, US planters provided bondspeople living conditions that favored birth rate growth, pressuring enslaved women to get pregnant. As we have seen, in some cases, forced sexual intercourse was not excluded. But despite these similarities and contrasts, both in the United States and in Brazil, slave marriages were also an instrument of accommodation and control used by slave owners to prevent the enslaved populations from resisting slavery by escaping and planning revolts.