404 pages : illustrations, genealogical table ; 25 cm
Contents
Introduction: "The marriage certificate" -- "Until distance do you part" -- "God made marriage, but the white man made the law" -- Marriage rights require more than manumission -- Marriage "under the flag" -- A civil war over marriage -- Reconstructing intimacies -- "To correct as far as possible the most cruel wrongs" -- Hopes and travails at century's end
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.--