The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2005 by Stephen Berry

The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion. By Thomas E. Buckley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv, 346 pp. $19.95 paper; $59.95 cloth).

Something like fifty percent of American marriages end in divorce: This is a figure much quoted, and much lamented, in the American media. And of course, to the extent that it is true, it is lamentable; blasted hopes and unfulfilled expectations usually are. But we should be careful not to blindly use the divorce rate as an indicator of the health of the institution of marriage. In the nineteenth century, there were fewer divorces--and, as a consequence, more miserable marriages. By stigmatizing divorce and making it more difficult to obtain, Victorian courts and legislatures ensured that an important minority of couples drifted along in ghostships of unhappiness. Given inequalities in the law, this was more often true for women. But men too stayed in marriages that hollowed out their hearts. While on a business trip in 1860, Mississippian Henry Craft shuddered at the prospect of returning home to his wife. "In my intercourse with men," he wrote in his diary, "I hear them talk of their homes and their families with a pang at my heart. Others seem to be hurrying home as the benumbed man seeks the fire.... Home. What a mockery to talk of my having a home." (1)

How prevalent was such unhappiness? How healthy were Victorian marriages? These are tricky questions. The Victorians' reputation for prudery has been ridiculously exaggerated, but their penchant for privacy was very real. In The Great Catastrophe of My Life, Thomas E. Buckley provides a rare glimpse behind the curtain of Victorian propriety in his examination of the 471 surviving divorce petitions to the Virginia legislature for the years 1786 to 1851.

During this period, the legislature was the only mode by which an unhappy couple could receive a full, legal divorce. There were other options, of course. Parties to a marriage could, in the immortal words of Wash Hogwollop, "R-U-N-N-O-F-T." Or they could seek to have their separation recognized by local authorities. Innumerable couples undoubtedly took these paths, but such "solutions" did nothing to protect their property rights or their right to remarry. To safeguard these, men and women had to petition the legislature, which meant they had to open up their lives to the prying eyes of their representatives. Though regrettable from their perspective, the result is an historian's mother lode--relatively fat files of petitions, affidavits, and corroborating documentation dedicated to extremely private matters.

In sifting through these files, Thomas Buckley has done an admirable job. His initial three chapters provide context for the petitions. He first examines the attitudes and actions of the legislators themselves, who, despite being occasionally embarrassed and consistently plagued by divorce applications, nevertheless stood steadfastly by their roles as arbiters of the social good and protectors of a social structure based on unbroken marriages and unbroken families. Lawmakers, Buckley concludes, were generally unsympathetic to petitioners who were merely miserable. If they could show that their marriage had never been valid in the first place--as in cases of fraud, bigamy, or impotence--they stood a far better chance. In making such judgments, the legislators drew on a religious sensibility--the subject of chapter two--that strongly encouraged men and women to redeem, repent, reform, and forgive, but never divorce. Finally, in chapter three, Buckley reminds readers that unhappy couples seeking divorce drew families and communities into their conflict. In an era when kinship networks were vast and family fortunes rose and fell together, divorce proceedings became a kind of community theater that reflected and reaffirmed power relations, gender prerogatives, and clan solidarity.

The meat of Buckley's study, however, is the next section, made up of three chapters that examine the divorce petitions themselves. Buckley breaks the petitions into three categories, based upon the petitioner's justification for divorce. Chapter four focuses on petitioners' claims that their spouse had had interracial sex. As might be expected in a chauvinistic society, this was a far more successful argument when made by men against women. Regardless of class, if a man could prove that his wife had crossed the color line--and testimony that she had given birth to a mulatto child was pretty persuasive evidence--he stood in a relatively strong position. Women, by contrast, stood a better chance if they could prove a spousal pattern of drunkenness, debauchery, and consistent, life-threatening physical abuse. In chapter five, Buckley takes up the subject of the battered wife and demonstrates that legislators were most sympathetic to an abused woman who had tirelessly endured her husband's depravity and struggled, ultimately without success, to save him from himself. Finally, in chapter six, Buckley examines those petitioners who sought a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Here too men were more likely to get a sympathetic hearing--but only if they resented the cuckholding couple in the prescribed pattern. Immediately upon discovering the offense, a man needed to throw his wife roughly out of the house and preferably exchange shots or blows with the offending gentleman. Petitioners who took the high-hand with wife and paramour had a sense of honor legislators were more likely to respect--and reward with a divorce. In a final section Buckley presents an extended case study of one woman's harrowing marital experience. The story of Sally McDowell Thomas's very public separation and divorce from her husband, the governor of Maryland, lays bare the steep odds women faced in their struggles to recover their lives and their honor in a system that stigmatized women more than men, even when they were the victims.