Divorce, patriarchal authority, and masculinity: a case from early national Vermont.
In 1976, in a pathbreaking article on divorce in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Nancy Cott argued that the growing willingness of late eighteenth-century women to seek divorce implied that these wives were increasingly "asserting control over the direction of their lives" and that wives who sought divorce in the Revolutionary era were, in part, responding to an "enhanced sense of citizenship and legal rights." The fact that the success rate of women's divorce petitions also had improved suggested to Cott that wives' "status within the family had risen in the eyes of authorities." Other scholars, such as Merril Smith, Glenda Riley, Steven Mintz, and Susan Kellogg, have portrayed the growing numbers of divorces and the increasingly liberal divorce laws of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as indicative of a gradual cultural shift away from traditional notions of patriarchal authority within marriage, toward more egalitarian and companionate marital ideals. More liberal divorce laws and proceedings implicitly allowed wives to judge their husbands and to appeal to the courts to end their marriages when the women believed that their husbands had behaved inappropriately. Such laws provided married women with a way to challenge and possibly dissolve their husbands' authority over them. When viewed in this context, liberal divorce laws appear to have mounted a sustained challenge to marital patriarchy. However, not all historians have agreed with this assessment of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century divorce law and practice. Michael Grossberg, in particular, has argued persuasively that increasingly liberal divorce laws did not truly undermine male authority within marriage, but rather substituted the authority of a male judiciary for that of husbands. Other scholars who share this view also maintain that instead of challenging patriarchy, more liberal divorce laws merely provided a "safety valve," a remedy for the worst abuses of patriarchal marriage, while upholding an ideal of benevolent patriarchal authority within marriage. (1)The debate over the relationship between divorce and patriarchy has been invaluable to our understanding of the opportunities available for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century husbands and wives to shape their marriages, as well as to our understanding of the larger cultural implications of individual marital conflicts. However, the debate has focused on divorce law and practice primarily from the point of view of legislators, jurists, and legal commentators. Very few scholars have attempted to assess the effects of divorce on patriarchal authority from the points of view of those husbands and wives who appeared before the courts to resolve their marital difficulties. To a certain degree, this lack of scholarship reflects the lack of sources detailing the personal experiences and perceptions of couples who divorced. On occasion, however, the participants in these divorce dramas left records that allow us to hear their voices and examine their experiences. One such case occurred in Middlebury, Vermont, in 1823, when Almena Hall petitioned the Vermont Supreme Court for a divorce and alimony from her husband Elias.
The Halls lived in a state that, at the time, had one of the most lenient divorce laws in the nation. Vermont's 1779 divorce statute empowered the state's highest court to grant divorces on the grounds of adultery, fraudulent contract, and desertion. By 1805, the list of grounds had expanded to include impotence and intolerable severity. The Vermont Supreme Court appears to have applied the law liberally, denying only five of 259 extant petitions presented in Chittenden, Washington, and Windsor counties between 1790 and 1830. The Halls had been married eleven years when Almena asked the court to grant her a divorce on the grounds of intolerable severity. Elias responded by countersuing for a divorce on the grounds of adultery. On January 30, 1823, the court declared that it would hear both petitions at the same time. It is extremely difficult to determine what happened when Almena and Elias Hall appeared before the court to present their versions of their marital disputes. However, the court's decision is quite clear: it found in favor of Almena, granted her a divorce, declared Elias to be worth 2,500 dollars and awarded Almena 750 dollars as alimony. (2)
Believing that the trial and verdict were unjust, in April of 1823, Elias petitioned the court for a new trial, but the justices rejected his petition because it did not follow the proper format. In October, Hall traveled to Montpelier to petition the state legislature for a new trial. The legislature rejected this petition and, to add insult to injury, Hall was arrested for not complying with the provisions of Almena's alimony award. For the next two years, Hall languished in jail, trying a series of legal maneuvers to gain his freedom, all to no avail. Then, in desperation, Hall decided that he needed to appeal to a higher power. In an attempt to influence public opinion, Hall published a sixty-four page pamphlet entitled, A disclosure of facts, in consequence of a decree for alimony by the supreme court, Addison County, January term, 1823, against Elias Hall. (3)
Hall's pamphlet contains an autobiographical sketch and detailed accounts of his version of the couple's marital conflict and the legal proceedings surrounding their divorce. The pamphlet also contains a collection of depositions from neighbors and friends that support Hall's account. This remarkable document provides a window into one man's interpretation of his marriage and divorce. Hall's pamphlet reveals that his marital difficulties and divorce experience were painful and disconcerting because they violated his belief in himself as a benevolent patriarch and his belief in the rights he possessed as a productive, loyal citizen of the republic, beliefs that were central to Hall's masculine identity.
Hall's pamphlet reveals the specific contours of his sense of manhood, a sense of self constructed from his identities as an independent producer, a kind husband and father, and a property-owning citizen of the republic. In his pamphlet, Hall constructed a narrative of his life that stressed his work as a skilled craftsman, his service to the nation as a loyal citizen, and his support and care for his family. Hall had fashioned a masculine identity as citizen, producer, and household head, and his pamphlet reveals the extent to which his divorce experience threatened each facet of this identity. The court's affirmation of his wife's version of their marriage difficulties threatened Hall's sense of himself as a benevolent husband and father. Likewise, the sizeable alimony award granted to Almena jeopardized Hall's ownership of his property, threatening his status as an independent producer. Finally, Hall believed that his wife's successful divorce, which he felt she obtained through fraud and manipulation, threatened his right as a citizen to a fair, impartial hearing in a court of law. Hall's pamphlet demonstrates the potential of divorce to threaten individual men's exercise of patriarchal authority and their masculine identities in very concrete ways.
The foundation of Hall's masculinity was his work experience as a successful gunsmith. In the autobiographical sketch he included in his pamphlet, Hall briefly outlined his rise to prosperity:
I have never had the benefit of even a common school education. In this situation ... at the age of nineteen, I went into the world penny-less. After about ten years industry, and the most rigid economy, I found by estimation, that I had acquired from ten to twelve thousand dollars worth of property ... but never commanded much money. I had acquired the whole by my own industry and hard earnings, and not by speculation.
During the War of 1812, Hall contracted with the United States government to repair small arms at Burlington, Vermont, on Lake Champlain. His work as a successful gunsmith and his service to his nation were a source of pride throughout Hall's life. Thirty-five years after Hall published his pamphlet, he wrote a letter to the Vermont Historical Society regarding a controversy over who had been the first in the state to use a particular process for sawing marble. Hall claimed to have been present at this auspicious event, and as testimony to his reliability and trustworthiness he referred to his work experience:
I now say to you that I was one of the first to lead in Mechanicks and that I have done more for the advancement of Manufactors than any other in this State; and I have more evidence of Services in the War of 1812 than any other.
Nearly eighty years old when he wrote these words, Hall's letter, like his pamphlet, reveals the importance to him of his identity as a successful citizen/producer. (4)
Into his pamphlet's narrative of self-made success, however, Hall injected a stumbling block: his wife. Hall repeatedly accused Almena of having acted in ways that harmed his business. He claimed that Almena had refused to provide board for his apprentices and journeymen, and that she had opposed moving to locations where he could better tend to his business affairs. Hall also accused Almena of having charged large sums for luxury items to his accounts with local merchants. According to Hall, "In this state of things my affairs became changed--my former friends appeared my enemies--adversity took the place of prosperity, I soon became embarrassed, and my property wasted." Almena had "ruined my property, reputation and happiness." Almena had refused to support Hall's business interests and, according to Hall, she also had refused to perform traditional female household labors. Hall complained that Almena "wholly refused to wash, make, or mend any clothes for me ... and even wished I would sell my cow, to save her the trouble of taking care of the cream. She was absent from home half the time, and whenever she obtained her meals abroad, I had to cook my own victuals, and many times when she was at home, or go without." Hall had expected Almena to defer to him as the head of household and to act in ways that would serve his interests; instead, she defied his wishes and refused to be the help mate that Hall desired. (5)
In spite of Almena's bad behavior, Hall insisted that he had continued to treat her with kindness, to no avail. He maintained that "prudence in me, was construed by her into slavish fear; that forbearance only excited her malevolence, and kindness only increased her demands." Hall presented himself as a benevolent household head, concerned only with maintaining peace within his home and fulfilling his familial obligations. However, Almena's refusal to perform her duties led Hall to conclude that the marriage was untenable. He claimed that "I made many unsuccessfull attempts to agree on a separation, in which I proposed to give her a certain sum, or that she might go where she pleased, and I would support her." Throughout Hall's description of his treatment of Almena, he stressed his willingness to support her and his attempts to act as a benevolent patriarch in spite of her actions defying his rightful, reasonable authority over her. In fact, Hall maintained that the only reason he sought to end his marriage was out of patriarchal concern for the welfare of his young son. He claimed that Almena's
conduct toward the child beggars all description. None but a father can imagine the anxiety I felt when I beheld her treatment towards him, and knew the consequence must inevitably be his ruin. Every person who knows the fellings [sic] of a father ... can but know that I must have felt the most extreme anxiety for him, and will not think strange that I should have sought some means to extricate him from that vortex of ruin, into which she was hastening his unwary steps. Had it not been for my anxiety for him I should probably chosen to have suffered in silence, as I had done before, that wretchedness which had been my lot for more than ten years, without making known to the world my unhappy situation.
In addition to this description of his actions and motivations, Hall included in his pamphlet depositions from friends and neighbors that supported his portrait of himself as a benevolent, forbearing patriarch, who acted only in the interests of his dependent son. According to these depositions, Elias Hall was a peaceable, sober, steady, industrious man who "provided well for his family [and] always treated her [Almena] well." (6)
Hall intended his narrative and the depositions he collected to demonstrate that Almena's charge of intolerable severity was false, and that her conduct as a wife had challenged his rightful and benevolent exercise of patriarchal authority within his family. He was especially indignant that when hearing the couple's divorce petitions, the court had affirmed Almena's charge of cruelty. By early nineteenth-century standards, the accusation of intolerable severity was slippery, vague, and carried the potential to undermine husbands' authority over their wives. By allowing divorce on the grounds of intolerable severity, the Vermont statute granted wives a role in determining the appropriate boundaries of their husbands' authority. If husbands violated their wives' understandings of the proper exercise of authority within marriage, the women could petition the court for divorce, which would remove them permanently from their husbands' control. Because of intolerable severity's potential to undermine patriarchal authority, legal commentators such as James Kent cautioned that courts should only allow such divorces if the causes were "grave and weighty." The vast majority of Vermont wives who petitioned for divorce assumed that the court would apply a strict standard of proof to the accusation of intolerable severity. Women who charged their husbands with cruelty were very careful to document specific acts of physical violence, usually noting the exact dates, and sometimes the times, of the abuse, and mentioning any witnesses to these events. (7)
Almena Hall's petition did not conform to these standards. Instead, she claimed that "the said Elias Hall, did on various pretences, during the time she lived with him as aforesaid treat your petitioner with intolerable severity." Almena did not include the customary details found in such petitions, a fact that Elias eagerly seized on. Calling Almena's charge of intolerable severity "vague and indefinite," Elias claimed, "I must confess, that among all the abuses I have received from her, she never did, until more than two months after our separation, accuse me of intolerable severity, and the first time in her petition ... [which] gave me no data as to the time when such pretended severity happened." Almena Hall's vague charge of intolerable severity challenged Elias's patriarchal authority, an authority that he insisted he had exercised in a benevolent manner. (8)
Hall's belief that his wife had defied his rightful authority is reflected in the depositions included in his pamphlet. Hall's friends and neighbors described Almena as a troublesome, contentious woman who left home and charged items to her husband's accounts without his knowledge or consent, behaviors not in keeping with legal and cultural norms that expected wives' submission and deference to their husbands. James Page, a young man who had boarded with the Halls, reported that "Mrs. Hall was gone more than I have been in the habit of seeing any wife." Another boarder testified that "the conduct and treatment of Mrs. Hall to her husband was very unbecoming, improper, and indecorous and provoking ... such conduct as a female and a wife ought to be ashamed of.... Her object and delight appeared to be, the destruction of her husband's happiness." The depositions paint a picture of a wife determined not to recognize her husband's authority over her. In fact, one deponent testified that "I heard Mrs. Hall say, she would let Elias Hall know that she would be his master." (9)
Hall's concern with establishing himself as a patriarch who exercised authority benevolently and his indignation over the outcome of his divorce hearing reveal his fear that Almena had mastered him. Throughout his pamphlet, Hall moved between presenting himself as a competent, successful craftsman, a loyal citizen, a dutiful, kind husband and father, and presenting himself as Almena's victim. Hall claimed that at the time he met Almena he was "wholly ignorant and unsuspicious of the wicked devices of a strange woman, but was possessed of considerable wealth, and was reputed to be still more wealthy than facts would warrant.... I was ignorant of the designing subtlety of which some women are capable of practicing to ensnare an unlearned man." In Hall's mind, Almena had tricked him into marrying her so that she could obtain his supposed riches. Hall went on to complete this self-portrait as a victim by accusing Almena of adultery. (10)
Hall's narrative of victimhood conflicted with his more masculine presentation of himself as a self-made success. Indeed, his pamphlet reveals Hall's discomfort with the idea of himself as Almena's victim. In a fairly unconvincing attempt to reconcile his self-presentation as a victim with his identity as an independent producer and a loyal citizen, Hall claimed that Almena had been able to dupe him into marrying her because "having been engaged constantly in my business I had very little opportunity to learn her character." Hall attributed his ignorance of female machinations to the fact that his "opportunities to acquire information, have been prescribed by continual labor, within very narrow limits." Hall even managed to construe Almena's adultery--which he claimed had occurred while he was away serving the United States during the War of 1812--as a byproduct of his attention to his business and citizenship duties. (11)
Hall's discomfort at portraying himself as Almena's victim is palpable; however, he was very careful to point out that he was not the only victim of Almena's wily machinations. If Almena had mastered him, it was only because the Vermont Supreme Court, by granting her a divorce and alimony, had made it possible for her to do so. Hall firmly believed that the court also had been manipulated by Almena. Hall maintained that both the substance of Almena's charge against him and the form of the trial proceedings were seriously flawed as a result of female manipulations and lies. Hall maintained that at the divorce proceedings, Almena and witnesses on her behalf had given false testimony regarding his alleged cruel treatment of Almena and regarding the value of his property, an issue of some importance when determining what, if any, alimony to award. Hall insisted that his property was worthless because he had mortgaged it heavily to pay his considerable debts. Hall claimed that at the trial the justices had allowed him less than ten minutes to present his evidence and witnesses, before silencing him and adjourning. Hall was angry at the court's acceptance of Almena's version of events and of her evaluation of his financial status. He believed that had the justices permitted him to present his evidence in full, their decision would not have been in Almena's favor. Hall complained bitterly of never having had "an opportunity to make my defence against a claim made without right, and attempted to be supported by testimony, which I am ready to prove to be false, but have never had an opportunity." Hall expressed his distress at the court's failure to uphold his rights as a husband and a citizen:
without ... an opportunity to call for evidence in my favor, I am deprived of my liberty, and confined to prison on an execution, obtained by the judgment of the Supreme Court ... in favor of an adulterous, whoreish woman.
Hall firmly believed that the court had violated his fundamental rights as a citizen. By claiming that "my own personal liberty, and the constitutional rights of every citizen were involved," Hall presented his particular experience as a potentially dangerous precedent that threatened all citizens' rights. (12)
Hall had assumed that, as a citizen, he had the right to present his version of his marriage difficulties to the court. This assumption did not prove to be correct, and in Hall's mind, the court's refusal to grant him the hearing he believed he deserved was a manifestation of a dangerous inversion of proper gender roles. Hall's experience led him to believe that women's ability to petition for divorce and alimony was a potential threat to male citizens' rights. Granting wives access to the courts threatened a legal system initially designed to protect the interests and rights of men. Hall wrote,
In criminal cases the traitor, the murderer and every offender against
the law, down to him who is only guilty of petit larceny, are all
entitled to a candid and impartial trial by a jury ... and have a
right to be heard in their defence.... If a man owes, and is sued, he
can delay final judgment, in various ways. He is entitled to an appeal
or review, as the case may be. And if one man by disagreement gets
entangled in the law with another, he also is entitled to a trial by a
jury of the country, although the sum in contest be less than one
dollar. But, if a man has the misfortune to be connected with a female
whose conduct and character make her a disgrace to her sex, and she by
any means procures a decree of the Supreme Court, for alimony ("no
matter how obtained,") the scene becomes changed--his doom is fixed.
Though the decree is obtained by perjury and fraud, it must be
endured. There is no relief.
Hall's description of the rights of citizenship and the threat to those rights is distinctly gendered. The citizen he described is male; the threat, a manipulative woman with the right to use the court to escape from her husband's authority and to obtain his property. (13)
The theme of female manipulation of individual men and of the judicial process runs throughout Hall's pamphlet. Elias claimed that not only had Almena tricked him into marrying her so that she could obtain his property, she also had lied to the court about his behavior and the value of his property as part of an intentional campaign to manipulate judicial proceedings. According to Elias, Almena had recruited several powerful male friends to act in her interest, one of whom was William Slade, the clerk of the court. Hall accused Slade of stealing relevant case files that would have supported Elias's version of events, and he claimed that after the court had adjourned on the day it heard the Halls' case, the judges attended a party of ladies, where Slade's wife spoke against Elias to the Chief Justice. Drawing on well-worn cultural symbols, Hall summarized Almena's manipulative actions by calling her "a serpent in disguise, and skilled in all the wiles and machinations of that diabolical spirit, which possessed the first of her race, and caused the fall of mankind." According to Hall, granting such manipulative women access to the courts allowed them to overturn husbands' authority within their marriages, to obtain their husbands' property, and even to deny men access to a fair, impartial judiciary. (14)
At first glance, Hall's claim that divorce and alimony awards threatened men's patriarchal authority, property ownership, and citizenship rights might appear to be nothing more than one man's over-reaction to a legal suit that did not go his way. However, a close examination of Hall's response to his experience reveals that throughout his pamphlet he drew on and referred to ideas, issues, and symbols that were common and powerful referrents of masculinity and patriarchy in early nineteenth-century America. Yet, patriarchal and masculine ideals were changing at this time, and these broader themes that weave throughout Hall's narrative demonstrate how threatening these changes could be.
The most striking theme that emerges throughout Hall's account is his conflation of his rights as a husband and his rights as a citizen, and his fear that manipulative women were using the courts to threaten those rights. For Hall, as for the vast majority of early nineteenth-century American men, the roles of husband and citizen were conjoined. According to Anglo-American political traditions, a man's status as a household head was crucial to establishing his citizenship capacity. A husband's exercise of authority over and support of his wife and children helped qualify and prepare him for full citizenship rights and responsibilities. Yet changing notions regarding the exercise of patriarchal authority complicated a man's position as household head in the early national period. Post-revolutionary Americans initiated a long and complex shift away from traditional patriarchal norms within marriage and family toward more companionate, egalitarian familial relations. Companionate marriage, freely entered into, and sustained by mutual affection and reciprocity became an increasingly important ideal in early nineteenth-century America, one which promised (or threatened) to soften the harsher edges of patriarchal marriage. (15)
Hall's description of his marriage demonstrates both the extent to which he was shaped by the companionate ideal and the ways in which he resisted it. His insistence that he had treated Almena kindly and with forbearance reveals that Hall had internalized the notion that benevolence, not autocratic rule, should characterize a household head's behavior. Yet Hall had not completely accepted the new reciprocal ideals. In his pamphlet, Hall included portions of a letter to Almena written by her daughter from a previous marriage. The letter is interesting for what it reveals about Almena's and her daughter's marriage ideals and for what Elias's reaction to it demonstrates about his marriage ideals. In the letter, Almena's daughter quoted a passage that she believed described her mother's marriage:
"I see women genteel, modest, blessed with sense, taste, delicacy, and every femenine [sic] virtue of the heart; but of weak spirits, bashful and timid. I see such women sinking into oblivion, and gradually losing every elegant accomplishment, for this very reason, that they are not united to a partner who has sense and taste to know their value, and who is able to draw forth their concealed qualities, and show them to advantage; who can give that support to those feeble spirits which they stand in need of, and who by his affection and tenderness, might make such a woman happy, in exerting every elegant art that might contribute to his amusement." I think, madam, this sentiment, of which I have selected, can properly be applied to your unfortunate choice.
Almena's daughter clearly believed that Elias Hall had not acted as an ideal husband should. She accused him of not appreciating Almena's qualities, of not offering Almena the support, affection, and tenderness a wife needed. According to this young woman, Hall was not an agreeable companion with whom Almena could live happily. Of course, Hall did not include this letter out of concern that his pamphlet provide opposing points of view. Rather, he included the letter as an example of what he believed were Almena's unreasonable expectations. While Hall was eager to present himself as a kind, benevolent husband, he was unwilling to validate--and instead, mocked--marital ideals that suggested a husband's chief role was to promote his wife's happiness. (16)
Hall's resistance to these aspects of the companionate ideal complements his concern with his ability to exercise authority within his family. Hall was eager to appear benevolent, but he insisted on his right to be a patriarch. Hall was not alone in his concern for his patriarchal authority; other men experiencing marital conflict in the early national period expressed similar views. In newspaper notices intended to alert their communities of their spouses' desertions, men described their wives' unwillingness to acknowledge their authority. Husbands lamented that their wives were "disobedient," "stubborn," "imperious," and "not willing to be restrained." One husband accused his spouse of refusing "all subjection to me as a wife;" others complained that their wives "refused to obey my lawful commands." Like Elias Hall, such men believed that the subjection of wives to their husbands was a proper and necessary component of the marriage relationship. (17)
Hall's concern with preserving patriarchal authority within marriage and his fear that female manipulation of the courts might harm men's ability to exercise basic citizenship rights also resonated with deeper cultural and legal currents regarding the reliability and proper use of married women's legal testimony. According to common law doctrines, married women could not testify against their husbands, a prohibition intended to align judicial procedure with the legal fiction of marital unity. The prohibition against married women's testimony reflected the belief that, because of their economic and legal dependence on their husbands, married women could not be relied upon to provide impartial, truthful testimony. Although no prohibition prevented either married women from testifying against men other than their husbands or single women from testifying against any man, historians have demonstrated that the belief that married women could not exercise independent judgment affected beliefs about the reliability of all women's testimony. Cornelia Dayton has analyzed the growing tendency of eighteenth-century Connecticut courts to treat any woman's testimony against a man with skepticism, especially in cases involving physical assault or sexual abuse. In the early national period, women's exclusion from full citizenship further highlighted their incapacity to testify against men. In an essay examining prosecutions for sexual assault in New York City between 1790 and 1820, Marybeth Hamilton Arnold argues that courts were increasingly skeptical of women's allegations of sexual assault and were increasingly unwilling to put "the life of a citizen in the hands of a woman." Elias Hall would have sympathized with the men accused in the cases Arnold examines; he, too, had experienced the ways in which a woman's testimony could change a citizen's life. Believing himself unjustly deprived of his status as a household head and of his property--both key elements in defining masculinity and citizenship capacity--Hall, like other American men, was convinced that the testimony of unscrupulous, manipulative women threatened the ability of the judicial system to impartially adjudicate the cases before it. (18)
Composed at a time when new marital ideals were softening patriarchal authority and when notions of republican citizenship highlighted skepticism regarding the reliability of women's testimony, Elias Hall's pamphlet speaks to legal and cultural issues that transcend his particular case. Hall's interpretation of his divorce experience indicates that some men believed that allowing women to petition for divorce and alimony not only threatened a marital hierarchy that privileged husbands, but also endangered fundamental rights of male citizenship. Divorce proceedings allowed women to question their husbands' exercise of authority, and a divorce decree removed women from that authority. Divorce allowed women to use the courts in ways that harmed male citizens' interests. A divorce decree could deprive a man of his property and his identity as a husband, two components vital to his citizenship status. From Elias Hall's point of view, his wife's ability to obtain a divorce and alimony threatened his authority as a husband and his independent manhood. For early nineteenth-century American men, divorce could be a painful experience, one that called into question the most basic components of their identities as husbands, property owners, citizens, and men.
ENDNOTES
1. Nancy F. Cott, "Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 33 (1976), 593-594, 613; Merril D. Smith, Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730-1830 (New York, 1991); Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York, 1991); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 301; Lawrence B. Goodheart, et.al., "'An Act for the Relief of Females': Divorce and the Changing Legal Status of Women in Tennessee, 1796-1860, Part II," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 44: 4 (Winter 1985): 410.
2. William Slade, Jr., ed. Vermont State Papers (Middlebury, Vt., 1823), 264; Statutes of the State of Vermont (Bennington, Vt., 1791), 50; William Slade, Jr., ed., The Laws of Vermont, of a Publick and Permanent Nature: Coming Down To and Including the Year 1824 (Windsor, Vt., 1825), 363. As in most other states during this time period, the Vermont Supreme Court "rode" a circuit, sitting twice a year in each county. Vermont Supreme Court records exist for Windsor County between February 1794 and June 1825, for Chittenden County between January 1800 and January 1824, and for Washington County between September 1821 and March 1829 (Vermont State Library, Montpelier, Vt.). Elias Hall, A disclosure of facts, in consequence of a decree for alimony by the supreme court, Addison County, January term, 1823, against Elias Hall (Montpelier, Vt., 1825), 15-19.
3. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 20-29; Middlebury, Vt., Land Records, Vol. IX, 37 (General Services Center of the State of Vermont, Middlesex, Vt.); Journal of the General Assembly of the State of Vermont (1827): 204-205; Journal of the General Assembly of the State of Vermont (1828): 23-24.
4. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 4-7; Elias Hall ALS to Vermont Historical Society, September 18, 1860 (Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, Vt.).
5. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10.
6. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 10-11, 41, 44, 50.
7. James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 4 Vols. (Boston, 1884 repr. of 1826 original), II, 157. Based on an examination of extant Vermont Supreme Court records in Chittenden, Washington, and Windsor counties between 1790 and 1830, only 14 percent of Vermont wives who petitioned for divorce did so on the sole ground of intolerable severity; 73 percent of these wives documented specific acts of violence.
8. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 15-16.
9. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 37-39, 43, 48, 50, 51.
10. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 5-6; emphasis in original.
11. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 5-7.
12. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 4, 19, 23; emphasis in original.
13. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 3-4.
14. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 5-6, 16, 19, 64.
15. On the relationship between a man's status as household head and his citizenship rights and responsibilities, see Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, 2000), 7, 12; Joan R. Gundersen, "Independence, Citizenship, and the American Revolution," Signs 13 (Fall, 1987): 75-76; Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York, 1998), 2, 16, 79, 80; and Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C., 1998), 44-45. For discussions of companionate marriage in the early national period, see Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore, 1998); Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 44 (October, 1987): 689-721; and Smith, Breaking the Bonds, esp. Ch. 2.
16. Hall, A disclosure of facts, 10.
17. In her analysis of nineteenth-century divorce suits in Indiana and New York, Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley, Ca., 1999), 126-133, finds that many husbands struggled to reconcile the exercise of marital authority with the new emphasis on companionship and marital intimacy. Nathaniel Jewett, Vermont Journal [Windsor, Vt.], May 7, 1805; Lovwell Johnson, Brattleboro Reporter [Brattleboro, Vt.], May 30, 1812; Josiah Webb, Connecticut Courant [Hartford, Ct.], January 29, 1822; Timothy Kittredge, Vermont Journal, October 8, 1799; Elijah Branch, Middlebury Mirror [Middlebury, Vt.], August 5, 1807; Parker Chapy, Vermont Journal, October 27, 1817; Timothy Wood, Connecticut Courant, August 1, 1791. Husbands printed these notices to alert their communities of their wives' desertions and of their intention to no longer pay their wives' debts. I have collected 1,187 such notices from all Vermont newspapers published between 1790 and 1830, and 461 desertion postings in Hartford County, Connecticut, newspapers published in the same time period. For a more thorough analysis of these desertion notices, see Mary Beth Sievens, "'The Wicked Agency of Others': Community, Law, and Marital Conflict in Vermont, 1790-1830," Journal of the Early Republic, 21:1 (Spring, 2001): 19-39.
18. For an excellent discussion of the common law status of married women, see Joan R. Gundersen and Gwen Victor Gampel, "Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 39:1 (January, 1982): 114-134 and Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York, 1986), Ch. 5. On skepticism regarding women's testimony, see Marybeth Hamiliton Arnold, "'The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman': Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790 to 1820," in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, 1989), 35-56 and Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 11, 60-61, 66-67, 246, 283-284.
By Mary Beth Sievens
SUNY Fredonia
Department of History
Fredonia, NY 14063
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| Author: | Sievens, Mary Beth |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Journal of Social History |
| Geographic Code: | 1U1VT |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2004 |
| Words: | 6085 |
| Previous Article: | The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: gender and power in the case of Ruth Snyder. |
| Next Article: | "The forgetfulness of sex": devotion and desire in the courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld. |
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