Not quite; married women, like minors and idiots, had no legal
status--could not contract, sue in court, etc. While, a wife retained
ownership ofher property (slave or land), it was under the total control
of her husband who managed it and received all benefit from the
property--rents, wages, etc. Only after her husband died did she regain
control of her property. True, he could not sell it without her consent,
but if he survived her, he retained a life interest in it after her
death if a child was born alive of their union.
Barbara Vines Little, CG, FNGS, FVGS
PO Box 1273
Orange, VA 22960
[log in to unmask]
540-832-3473
CG, Certified Genealogist, is a service mark of the Board for
Certification of Genealogists, used under license by board certified
genealogists after periodic evaluation, and the board name is registered
in the US Patent & Trademark Office.
On 5/17/2012 5:19 PM, Richard Dixon wrote:
> When discussing the property and legal rights of women in "early
> Virginia," it is important to make the distinction between
> single/widowed women and married women. Influenced by the Commentaries
> of Blackstone, married women in the 18th and 19th centurywere
> considered one with the husband; there were not two separate legal
> persons. Even when she owned property within the marriage, few would
> deal directly with her without the consent of her husband. However, a
> single/widowed woman could inherit property, could purchase property,
> and could will her property. So, the slaves inherited from her husband
> by Martha Custis remained her property, and did not become the
> property of George Washington upon her marriage to him. Simlarly,
> Arlington House was deeded to Mary Custis Lee as a life estate,
> passing in fee on her death to her son Custis Lee (not to be, of
> course, with the advent of war). A single/widowed woman was f/emme
> sole, /and except for the right to vote, her legal status was not much
> different from that of a man.
>
> Richard Dixon
> Editor Jefferson Notes
> 571-748-7660
>
>
> On 5/16/2012 3:55 PM, Eric Richardson wrote:
>> Kevin,
>> The source is from 16th& 17th Century English Literature, not
>> Ecclesiastical debates. This is most readily seen in the homosocial love
>> poetry of Shakespeare, *The Sonnets, *specifically* *to the Young man
>> and
>> the reasons for marriage. Shakespeare provides the gentry's view on the
>> institution of marriage, not the Church of England's nor that of the
>> Roman
>> Catholic Church. I will check my source when I next speak to him but
>> this
>> is the convergence of History, Literary Criticism, and Theology. If
>> there
>> is a European (Settler-Colonial) rank before your name, you are not
>> of the
>> socioeconomic class that I examine; President Jefferson is all well and
>> good, but what about the Hemmings and their relationship to the
>> Wayles (nee
>> Skelton), since both women shared a common father and children by
>> Thomas?
>> If slavery ended in 1820 (prior to Jefferson's death), how would his
>> in-laws have received his children by an enslaved mother? How would the
>> local community have reacted? Would their reaction not have more
>> bearing
>> on the end of slavery than pronouncements from the pulpit, podium, or
>> political grandstand? If Melvin Patrick Eli is correct in *Israel on
>> the
>> Appomattox,* should not the experience of the "otherwise free" serve
>> as a
>> guiding experience and not just the enslaved people, for the end of
>> slavery
>> without the Civil War?
>>
>> The equivalency I was attempting was that human beings, that had less
>> than
>> perfect possession of themselves (enslavement or coverture, as examples)
>> did have acknowledged souls after the Second Great Awakening.
>> Whether we
>> call it Social or Cultural History, women were treated as property by
>> custom by the lower socioeconomic classes and non-hegemonic groups in
>> the
>> South. Even among the elite, Martha Custis Lee (Washington's
>> granddaughter) did not posses Arlington House under her father's
>> will; her
>> husband, Robert E. Lee, did. She did not enjoy complete possession of
>> herself because of the customs, and the law, at that time. Even your
>> qualifications as to potential male punishment for assault or murder are
>> couched in a "could." I agree. Blanket statements have little
>> place here
>> but I never said it was law. It was custom. When a woman signs her own
>> Marriage Bond during the same time period, it is usually commented
>> upon by
>> Historians because it is unusual for a woman to assert that form of
>> self-possession. Frederick Douglass assaulted the white slave
>> breaker and
>> received no punishment in MD where the law was quite clear about such an
>> attack: death for the assailant. Yet, the law was ignored for local
>> reasons. Elizabeth Keckley was unjustly whipped by the headmaster of
>> the
>> Bingham School in Mebane, NC and while he was not guilty under the
>> law, she
>> claims that she held him up to public scorn so that he never did it
>> again.
>> She employed a sophisticated understanding of balance between societally
>> acceptable behavior and as you correctly indicate, the full power
>> available
>> under the law. However, if we are not to protect sacred cows, even the
>> argument (as to stratum of human society) that the enslaved could not
>> testify in court does not survive the tale of Hillery G. Richardson's
>> enslaved man, William. Facts are clear; William brutally attacked and
>> "virtually obliterated" Richardson's knee with a wheat cradle& scythe
>> after running away and being subsequently whipped. The jury
>> investigated,
>> took testimony from enslaved witnesses and returned a conviction on a
>> lesser charge, based in some degree, on those people's testimony. (Eli,
>> 407-11) This was in subsequent "Massive Resistance" (rolled into
>> *Brown v
>> Board*) Prince Edward County. If the attack would have occurred a
>> decade
>> or more later, William would probably have been lynched.
>>
>> For example, Baptist membership rolls from Sandy Creek Baptist
>> Association
>> and Kentuck Baptist (the mother church in Pittsylvania county) indicate
>> membership was not extended to the enslaved people until the 1820s, the
>> earliest I recall was 1824. Prior to that, enslaved and free people,
>> who
>> were not white, do not appear in the membership lists. Mount Olive, the
>> mother of Baptist churches in Alamance County, NC had 37 founding
>> members
>> on 2 August 1834, 26 whites and 11 non-whites. Kentuck, the Mother in
>> Pittsylvania, was in existence for three decades without non-white
>> membership while Mt. Olive has founding membership that is non-white.
>> Something has changed over that time period in the Baptist church, which
>> appears to represent cultural or social change. First African
>> Baptist in
>> Richmond appears to follow a similar pattern when it was turned over,
>> albeit under white supervision, to non-white Trustees. The point I was
>> responding to was that in 1860, religious groups appear to
>> acknowledge that
>> the bondspeople have souls because they are baptised and brought under
>> doctrinal punishment regiments. The Society of Friends had done a
>> similar
>> inclusionary membership among their future dispossessed enslaved
>> people in
>> the early 19th Century. I have always been led to believe, this
>> doctrinal
>> issue of punishment had prevented earlier memberships because of
>> oxymoronic
>> nature of Christian master/Christian slave. I would welcome any
>> additional
>> information on this change. I have skimmed Charles' book but have not
>> returned to it yet. (It is on my summer reading list.) So by the
>> 1840s,
>> the Baptist, Friends, Dunkards (who ordained their first African
>> American
>> minister during the decade), Presbyterians, Wesleyans, and the United
>> Brethren (all with significant memberships in VA and the northern border
>> counties in NC) hold that chattel have souls and can be of the
>> Elect/Select, even if they can be alienated. That is somewhat
>> dramatically
>> different than "they were not in the stratum of human society." If one
>> assumes that literature represents a certain segment of society, then
>> the
>> status of white women, however that is defined, who had an earlier,
>> similar
>> position, experienced an evolution of thought on their possession of
>> souls. If I overstepped propriety, it was not my intent but to compare
>> analogous situations. But does not the enslavement of indentured white
>> women, who had children by enslaved men, allow for more latitude in
>> comparison? Reproductive control reduced women to slaves for life and
>> their offspring followed *Partus Sequitor Ventrem.* If one cannot find
>> analogies between antebellum women and chattel, than a considerable
>> amount
>> of African American Literature that argues for a common enemy for
>> women and
>> African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries is based
>> upon
>> false assumptions. It is a logical incongruity in sister disciplines
>> and
>> the fictive realm may tell us more about broader social currents, if one
>> believes Cultural History methodology.
>>
>> I look at ethnicities across the South. If we look at pre-contact VA,
>> Mourning War would have functioned as a societal safety valve, keeping
>> communities in balance by replacing members from outside the group,
>> including women. Julianna Barr's* Peace Came in the Form of a Woman:
>> Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands* looks at this female
>> commodification in Texas, which may be similiar to what was seen between
>> John Smith& Pocahontas in VA. If it is chattel bondage, the woman
>> appears to be alienable, following the Federal Indian Civilization
>> program
>> under Jefferson, even in historically matrilineal groups. If it is
>> Mourning War, it is not so clear. Some Native American females were
>> alienable (those captured in war in VA during the late 17th Century)
>> while
>> others were not alienable but were still a form of property under a
>> Native
>> American form of slavery. This system is what the English colony was
>> founded alongside. When did it disappear? The Dawes Freedmen rolls
>> have
>> Catawba women listed as former bondspeople in the 1890s, who went on the
>> Trail of Tears. Since Removal was imperfect and the initial
>> discussion was
>> on the end of slavery without the Civil War, these types of slavery (and
>> with Mourning War, a different route to manumission) exist concurrently
>> with gang, task, maritime, and rice& indigo slavery. If we are to
>> argue a
>> counter-factual, should not divergent sources be included?
>>
>> Thank you for the criticism. I should have been even more specific.
>> Best,
>> Eric
>>
>> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Hardwick, Kevin - hardwikr<
>> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> Eric Richardson writes: "As to inclusion in the stratum of human
>>> society,
>>> women were property regardless of ethnicity during the same period and
>>> coming from English tradition, there were questions as to whether
>>> they had
>>> souls. John Donne, Shakespeare, And Milton all hold a similar
>>> viewpoint
>>> about women."
>>>
>>> I'd like to see these claims warranted somehow in sources. I can
>>> say with
>>> complete confidence, based on study of Church of England theology,
>>> that no
>>> Anglican, in Virginia or in Great Britain, at any time tried to
>>> defend the
>>> claim that only men had souls. The broader notion that Christian faith
>>> more broadly denied the existence of souls in women is something of a
>>> canard, and derives from various relatively obscure debates during the
>>> reformation (over the proper translation of the latin "homo" for
>>> example).
>>> I don't know the theology of protestant dissent anywhere near so
>>> well as I
>>> do that of the Church of England, but I'd be very surprised indeed if
>>> Baptist or Presbyterian ministers at any point attempted to argue that
>>> women did not have souls. Perhaps Charles Irons or John Ragosta, or
>>> someone similarly knowledgeable in these sources can comment?
>>>
>>> I am also uncomfortable with the blanket assertion that "women were
>>> property" under 17th or 18th century Virginia law. It certainly is the
>>> case that the legal doctrine of coverture operated in British Colonial
>>> Virginia, and that this doctrine was debilitating to the status of
>>> women.
>>> But there were important distinctions between the dependent status of
>>> women and that of enslaved persons. For one thing, enslaved
>>> persons, as
>>> property, could be alienated--they could be bought and sold. For
>>> another,
>>> Virginia law released masters of slaves from the sanctions applied
>>> against
>>> men or women who perpetuated the various legal categories of violence
>>> against other persons. In other words, a master who killed his
>>> slave was
>>> not guilty of murder; and a master who physically attacked his slave
>>> was
>>> not guilty of assault or battery. But in Virginia law, a husband who
>>> killed his wife, or a father who killed his daughter, or a son who
>>> killed
>>> his mother, *could* be found guilty of murder. Similarly, a husband
>>> who
>>> beat his wife, mother, or daughter could, under certain conditions, be
>>> found guilty of assault or battery. These strike me as important
>>> distinctions.
>>>
>>> Generally speaking, scholars who try to document evolving status of
>>> dependency and supremacy, of hierarchy, or of oppression and
>>> exploitation,
>>> draw a distinction in their work between the operation of slavery,
>>> and the
>>> various institutional dependencies to which women were subject.
>>> Thus, for
>>> example Chris Tomlins, in his brilliant (if unnecessarily difficult and
>>> over-written) study FREEDOM BOUND, treats slavery in one chapter, and
>>> dependencies of gender in another. He does this because they are
>>> not the
>>> same thing--they had different logics to them, both legal and
>>> social, and
>>> hence should be treated as analytically distinct categories.
>>>
>>> All best,
>>> Kevin
>>> ___________________________
>>> Kevin R. Hardwick
>>> Associate Professor
>>> Department of History, MSC 8001
>>> James Madison University
>>> Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
>>> ______________________________________
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>>
>>
>
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