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By Root 1171 0

agreeing not to formalize it. Some freedmen and freedwomen seized the chance to annul an incompatible and loveless marriage, which in several instances had been forced upon them by their owner. In a “divorce” case argued before a Union officer in Louisiana, the husband claimed he had done everything in his power for the comfort of his wife and wished to retain her, but the woman declared she could now take care of herself and refused to stay with a man whom she did not love.44 Among families that had survived bondage intact, the difficult post-emancipation decision about whether to stay with their last master also produced conflicts which were sometimes resolved by divorce. More often than not, however, those who lived together at the end of the war did not avail themselves of the opportunity to dissolve those ties, suggesting the extent to which their marriages had been based on considerations other than the convenience of the master.

During slavery, interracial sexual liaisons—usually between slave women and white men, sometimes between slave men and white women—had occasionally developed into affectionate and lasting relationships. Obviously, such ties could neither be solemnized nor legalized, and few even cared to admit that they were based on genuine feelings of love, particularly those involving white women. Emancipation permitted interracial couples to formalize those relationships, at least to the extent state laws and public opinion would tolerate them. When the daughter of a former slave owner in Mississippi announced her intention to marry one of their former slaves, with whom she had already established a relationship, a local judge refused to believe her avowal of love for the man and ordered the arraignment and trial of the couple. With different results, a quadroon mistress of a planter in Mississippi refused to continue a relationship with her master after the war unless he agreed to marriage; they finally prevailed upon a reluctant army chaplain to perform the necessary rites after the master claimed he had “married her in the sight of God five years ago.” The difficulties that confronted a white woman and a black man made any permanent relationship almost impossible in the postwar South. Although the courts always dealt harshly with attacks on whites, whatever the evidence, a court in Fredericksburg, Virginia, acquitted a black woman accused of assaulting a white woman who had “stolen the affections” of her black husband, prompting him to leave her for the white woman. That came about as close to justifiable assault in the eyes of the white community as any black person could commit.45

Neither the legalization nor the sanctification of black marriages necessarily moved the ex-slaves to adopt in full the sexual code of upper-class whites. “The negroes had their own ideas of morality, and held to them very strictly,” the proprietress of a Georgia plantation observed; “they did not consider it wrong for a girl to have a child before she married, but afterwards were extremely severe upon anything like infidelity on her part. Indeed, the good old law of female submission to the husband’s will on all points held good.” While both races frowned upon certain sexual practices (such as adultery), the differences which persisted in defining moral behavior (such as the condoning of prenuptial sex among blacks) and the post-emancipation complications surrounding polygamy help to explain the intensity with which white missionaries and black preachers dwelled on black “moral vices” and admonished the ex-slaves to conform in every respect to the Victorian moral code. When Clinton B. Fisk, a sympathetic Freedmen’s Bureau officer, counseled freedmen and freedwomen that God would no longer close his eyes to “adultery and fornication” among them, he was saying little that black preachers had not already said on numerous occasions. “Look at de white folks,” one such preacher told his congregation. “D’ye eber see a white man want to marry a woman when he had a lawful wife a libing? Neber! I neber heared ob sech a thing in