Bound in wedlock : slave and free Black marriage in the nineteenth century

Author

Tera W Hunter

Call Number

• 973.0496 H947 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.

Physical Description

404 pages : illustrations, genealogical table ; 25 cm

Summary

Tera W. Hunter offers the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century and into the Jim Crow era. She reveals the practical ways couples adopted, adapted, or rejected White Christian ideas of marriage, creatively setting their own standards for conjugal relationships under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.--

Contents

• Introduction: The marriage certificate
• "Until distance do you part"
• "God made marriage, but the white man made the law"
• More than manumission
• Marriage "under the flag"
• A civil war over marriage
• Reconstructing intimacies
• "The most cruel wrongs"
• Hopes and travails at century's end
• Epilogue: Legacies and challenges.