Our understanding of the marriage strategies and family formation of enslaved people remains clouded by disagreement among contemporary scholars. A perusal of the historical literature suggests that two issues lay at the root of this disagreement: First, scholars disagree over the extent to which slave family life was shaped by the external factors of slavery, or rather slave agency; and second, scholars appear reluctant to abandon their singular views of the slave family. This article addresses both of these gaps by formulating a middle ground in the slave agency debate and by redefining the slave family in plural form. An analysis of the boundaries and opportunities for family formation in northern Virginia and lowcountry South Carolina, this study shows that while the establishment of co-residential two-parent households was the ideal for slaves, not all were able to realize that ideal, and those that could not adapted their marriage strategies and family lives accordingly.
During the first half of the twentieth century, both scholarly works and popular culture upheld the myth that slave family households had predominately consisted of single mothers. Phillips' American Negro Slavery (1918 ), the authoritative work on the slave South, even furnished historians and students with the misguided impression that benevolent paternalist masters went out of their way to encourage stable family unions among their slaves, festively celebrating slave weddings, purchasing spouses who lived on other holdings, and punishing adultery-but that they largely failed. These ideas were rooted in the romantic myth of the Old South and the widespread belief among whites that African Americans were childlike, irresponsible, and promiscuous by nature. Only in the 1950s, especially with the publication of Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956), did scholars begin to blame slavery for the perceived instability of slave families. The image of the fatherless family remained, however; only the explanation changed. Stampp, like African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier before him, pointed to the fact that slave marriages lacked legal standing, and family members were subject to forced separation, concluding that slavery thwarted healthy family formation. See David Brion Davis, "A Review of the Conflicting Theories on the Slave Family," Journal of Blacks in Higher Education16 (Summer, 1997): 100-103; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by Plantation Regime (New York , 1918); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York, 1956); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins before the Civil War (Nashville, TN, 1932).
2.
Davis, "Review of the Conflicting Theories," 102-103; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom , 1750-1925 (New York, 1976); Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery ( Boston, 1974); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black & White: Family and Community in the Slave South ( New York, 1996); Wilma Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York, 2003); Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, GA, 1997); Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana, 2004).
3.
This article draws upon research for my doctoral dissertation (in progress) at the University of Leiden, entitled "Weathering Different Storms: Regional Agriculture and Slave Couples in the Non-Cotton South, 1800-1860."
4.
Nan Netherton, et al., Fairfax County, Virginia: A History (Fairfax, VA, 1978), 161-70; Avery Odell Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860 (Urbana, 1926), 72-73; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 ( Washington, 1933), vol. 2, 589-92; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), 157-58; Elijah Fletcher to Jesse Fletcher, Sr., 4 Aug. 1810, in Martha von Briesen, ed., The Letters of Elijah Fletcher (Charlottesville, 1965), 8 (quote).
5.
Samuel McPherson, ed., Memories of Samuel M. Janney (Philadelphia, 1881 ), 29-30 (first quote); Netherton, et al., Fairfax County, 152-70; Craven, Soil Exhaustion, 79-121; Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, 811-20; Arthur G. Peterson, "The Alexandria Market Prior to the Civil War," William and Mary Quarterly, 12 (Apr., 1932): 104-14; Lorena S. Walsh, "Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620-1820," Journal of Economic History , 49, no. 2 (June, 1989): 404; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census of the United States, 1820: Fairfax County, Virginia (microfilm), National Archives and Records Administration (hereinafter NARA), Washington, DC; Richard Marshall Scott, Sr., Diary, 1813-1828 (typescript), Virginia Room Rare Book Collection, Fairfax City Regional Library (hereinafter FCRL), Fairfax, Virginia (second quote).
6.
Anonymous, The Yankees in Fairfax County ( Baltimore, 1845), 3-24, 4-5 (quote); Richard H. Abbott, "Yankee Farmers in Northern Virginia, 1840-1860," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 76 (Jan., 1968): 56-63; Netherton, et al., Fairfax County, 152-70.
7.
Netherton, et al., Fairfax County, 152-70, 270; Craven , Soil Exhaustion, 140-41; Ethan Allen Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave-Trade in the United States, in a Series of Letters Addressed to the Executive Committee of the American Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race (1836; reprinted Freeport, NY, 1971), 117 (first quote); Bushrod Washington, in Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931; reprinted Columbia, SC, 1996), 15 (second quote); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census of the United States, Fairfax County Virginia, 1810-1860 (microfilm), Nara; Philo Tower, Slavery Unmasked, Being a Truthful Narrative of Three Years' Residence and Journey in Eleven Southern States (1856; reprinted New York, 1969), 50 (quote).
8.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census, 1810-1860; Richard Marshall Scott, Jr., Diary, 1 Jan. 1859 (typescript), Virginia Room Rare Book Collection, FCRL.
9.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census, 1820, 1850 (Slave Schedules).
10.
On the "geography of containment," see Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004), 6, 12-34.
11.
Most slave inventories, for example, simply list slaves singly with their respective values, indicating no family ties at all. Many record the matrilineal parentage of small children, however, especially when these children were to be sold or bequeathed along with their mothers. Fathers are only very rarely mentioned. This does not mean that fathers were absent or unknown to slaveholders, only that they were not designated to be bequeathed or sold with their wives and children, or-in the case of cross-plantation marriages-that they were of no consequence to the dispersal of the planters' slave property.
12.
This supports Brenda Stevenson's conclusion that broad marriages and female-headed households were "especially prevalent" in antebellum northern Virginia. Stevenson, Life in Black & White, 209 (quote).
13.
Estate Inventory of George Triplett, Fairfax County Will Book (hereafter referred to as simply "Will Book") O-1, 329 (microfilm), Fairfax City Regional Library (FCRL); Estate Inventory of Charles Guy Broadwater, Will Book P-1, 428, FCRL; Account of Sale of Estate of James Turley, Will Book P-1, 80, FCRL; Estate Inventory of James Burke, Will Book O-1, 200, FCRL. In the estate accounts of Fairfax County slaveholders there are several more examples of female-headed households, too numerous to mention here.
14.
Estate Inventory of Charles Smith, Will Book P-1, 349-50, FCRL; Slave Inventory of F. L. Lee estate, Will Book P-1, 15, FCRL; Estate Inventory of Sabret Scott, Will Book P-1, 140, FCRL.
15.
Stevenson, Life in Black & White, 209; Estate Inventory of Charles Henderson, Will Book M-1, 261, FCRL; Estate Inventory of Jacob Heinemann, Will Book M-1, 406, FCRL; Estate Inventory of Mastrom Cockerill, Will Book P-1, 122, FCRL (second quote); Account of Sale of the Estate of Wormley Carter, Will Book N-1, 261, FCRL (third quote).
16.
David Wilson Scott, Diary, May 20, 1820, LC, Washington, DC (first quote); John Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America during 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801 and 1802 ( New York, 1909), 400 (second quote); Camp, Closer to Freedom, 13-20, 20 (third quote) .
17.
Camp, Closer to Freedom , 28-30; Stevenson, Life in Black & White, 222; West, Chains of Love, 50.
18.
Alexandria Daily Advertiser, Commercial and Political, 24 June 1809, reprinted in Daniel Meaders, ed., Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1800-1820 (New York, 1991), 115 (first quote); Alexandria Gazette, Commercial and Political, 25 Apr. 1815, reprinted in ibid., 232 (second quote); Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 16 Nov. 1819, reprinted in ibid., 327 (third quote); Alexandria Daily Advertiser, Commercial and Political, 16 Oct. 1809, reprinted in ibid., 119 (fourth quote).
Blassingame, The Slave Community, 164; Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, 23 Mar. 1804, reprinted in Meaders, ed., Advertisements for Runaway Slaves, 32 (first quote); Jeanne Niccolls, "`Old John': In Search of His Story," Yearbook: The Historical Society of Fairfax County , Virginia, vol. 27 (1999-2000): 78 (second quote); Austin Steward, Twenty-two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (1857; Syracuse, 2002), 3 (third quote); Alexandria Gazette, Commercial and Political, 13 Dec. 1811, reprinted in Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves, 158 (fourth quote).
21.
Estate Inventory of William Fitzhugh, Will Book J-1, 285-94, FCRL; Donald Sweig, in his demographic study of northern Virginia slaves, also provides a detailed analysis of the Fitzhugh slaves, including helpful charts. Donald M. Sweig, "Northern Virginia Slavery: A Statistical and Demographic Investigation " (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, 1982), 115-23; Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, 25 Aug. 1801, reprinted in Meaders, Advertisements for Runaway Slaves, 4 (quote).
22.
Estate Inventory of William Fitzhugh; Sweig, "Northern Virginia Slavery," 115-23; Netherton, e.a., Fairfax County, 161. Brenda Stevenson, for one, takes the Fitzhugh inventory at face value and considers the singles to be kinless. Stevenson, Life in Black & White, 212. The Bossee family, many of whose members were listed singly, was quite large. Gowen Bossee (aged 70) is listed with what appears to be his younger wife Winny (50) and Winny's son Roderick (10). This may have been Bossee's second wife (such wide age differences are common in the inventory), or perhaps even his daughter, whose husband lived on another plantation and thus had her father living with her. Among the singles we find several members of the family: another Gowen Bossee (a carpenter, aged 45-most likely Bossee's son from a previous marriage), Billy Bossee (a blacksmith, aged 18), Gowen (aged 20), Bossee (aged 16), John Bossee, Senr. (50), John Bossee, Jr. (28), and Sarah Bossee (50). It is simply impossible to trace what the Bossee family tree looked like precisely. Suffice it to say that the singles listed in this inventory were not exactly kinless.
23.
Estate Inventory of William Fitzhugh; Naming patterns among Fairfax County slaves confirm Herbert Gutman's conclusions about African American naming practices both during and after slavery. In slave quarters throughout the South, naming children after their parents was commonplace. As Gutman himself points out, however, some slave children were also named for other kin, including grandparents or aunts and uncles. Gutman, The Black Family, 187-92, although such ties are more difficult to trace.
24.
Estate Inventory of B. R. Davis, Will Book O-1, 2, FCRL.
25.
Estate Inventory of William H. Wrenn, Will Book Y-1, 163; Estate Inventory of Cassius Carter, Will Book Y-1, 232; Estate Inventory of John Davis, Will Book Y-1, 302; Estate Inventory of William W. Triplett, Will Book Z-1, 126; Estate Inventory of Caleb J. Stone, Will Book W-1, 132.
26.
Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, 24 Nov. 1857 (first quote); Ibid., 7 Oct. 1857 (second quote); William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, etc. (1872; New York, 1968), 442-3 (third quote); Anne S. Frobel, The Civil War Diary of Anne S. Frobel of Wilton Hill in Virginia (Birmingham, AL, 1986), 36 (fourth quote), 72, 110; Richard Marshall Scott, Jr., 19 Dec. 1847, Diary (typescript), FCRL (fifth quote); Ibid., 10 June 1849 (sixth quote). The only case mentioned in the Bush Hill diaries of two slaves establishing a co-residential household was recorded by Virginia Gunnell Scott on 16 July 1854: "My servants Charles and Mary Ellen were married this evening at the Seminary by Dr. Packard." Virginia Gunnell Scott, Diary (typescript), FCRL.
George Jackson , in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38 (Washington , 1941), vol. 12, 45 (first quote); James Martin, in Slave Narratives , vol. 16, pt. 3, 62-63; James Redpath, The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States ( University Park, PA, 1996), 199 (second quote); George Williams, in Benjamin Drew, ed., A North-side View of Slavery. The Refugee; or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856; New York, 1968), 343 (third quote); Stills, Underground Railroad, 260, 385 (fourth and fifth quotes). Culpeper is approximately seventy-five miles from Alexandria. For more examples of Fairfax County broad couples in Stills' book, see pages 396, 468, and 469.
29.
Stevenson, Life in Black & White, 230-31; Frank Bell, in Charles L. Perdue, Jr., e.a., eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, 1976), 25 (quote); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Population Census of the United States, 1850: Fairfax County, Virginia, Slave Schedules, NARA; Ibid., Eighth Population Census of the United States, 1860: Fairfax County, Virginia, Slave Schedules. In 1850, some 698 out of 3,177 local slaves were classified as mulatto. In 1860, no less than 950 out of 3,116 slaves were mulatto.
30.
Francis Henderson, in Drew, ed., North-Side View of Slavery, 154 (first quote); Stills, Underground Railroad, 479 (second quote). Frank Bell claimed to have grown up on a plantation near Vienna that contained over 150 slaves, but this is almost certainly a gross exaggeration, because no holdings in late-antebellum Fairfax County were anywhere near that size. Nevertheless, Bell's memory surely suggests that he lived on a plantation with numerous slaves. Frank Bell, in Charles L. Perdue, Jr., e.a., eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, 1976), 25-26, 26 (third quote).
31.
Estate Inventory of Dennis Johnston, Will Book W-1, 299-300, FCRL.
32.
Ibid.
33.
J. MotteAlston, in Arney R. Childs, ed., Rice Planter and Sportsman: The Recollections of J. Motte Alston, 1821-1909 (Columbia, SC, 1999) 46 (first quote), 67-68 (second quote).
34.
George C. Rogers , Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Spartanburg, SC, 1990), 27-29; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 70-71; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, 1984), 41; Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, 1997), 8.
35.
Gray, History of Agriculture, vol. 2, 721-22; Joyce E. Chaplin, "Tidal Rice Cultivation and the Problem of Slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, 1760-1815," William and Mary Quarterly49 (Jan. 1992): 31-34, 39; Charlotte Petigru Alston, in Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 8 (quote); Dale E. Swan, "The Structure and Profitability of the Antebellum Rice Industry: 1859," Journal of Economic History31 (Mar. 1973 ): 322.
36.
Rogers, Jr., History of Georgetown County, 258, 259, 261-62, 279, 324, 339; Ben Horry, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38 (microfilm), vol. 14, part ii, 309 (quote). Despite some historians' claims that rice was on its way out during the nineteenth century as a result of increased competition from Asia, evidence clearly indicates that rice production in Georgetown District was expanding, and profitably so, right up until the Civil War. This supports conclusions drawn by William Dusinberre. Dusinberre argues that although rice exports decreased slightly during the antebellum period, this was compensated by a growing American domestic market, which increased threefold between 1830 and 1860 as a result of high duties on imported rice. Moreover, the shift from rice to sea-island cotton in Colleton and Beaufort Districts in the 1850s left Georgetown rice planters with a larger share of the market. In the decade preceding the Civil War alone, rice production in Georgetown District increased by 19 percent. See William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 387-416.
37.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census of the United States, 1800-1860: Georgetown District, South Carolina (microfilm), NARA; G. S. S., "Sketches of the South Santee," in Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South, Selected from the Periodicals of the Times (Lexington, KY, 1973), vol. 1, 7; Frederika Bremer, The Homes of the New World; Impressions of America (New York, 1954), vol. 1, 288; Rod Gragg, Pirates, Planters and Patriots: Historical Tales from the South Carolina Grand Strand (Winston-Salem , 1984), 47-48 (quote).
38.
William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (1863; Baton Rouge, 2001), 99 (first quote); Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood (1922; Atlanta , 1976), 53 (second quote), 63 (third quote).
39.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Census, 1820: Georgetown District , South Carolina; Ibid., 1850, Slave Schedules.
40.
Fifth Census of the United States, 1830: Georgetown District, South Carolina (microfilm), NARA, Washington DC; Davison McDowell, Second Account Book, 1811-1837, Davison McDowell Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
41.
"Appraisement of Slaves Belonging to the Estate of Benjamin Allston, Jr., 1819," reprinted in J. H. Easterby , ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston (Chicago, 1945), 331-2.
42.
Plantation Book of William Lowndes, 1802-1822, Papers of William Lowndes, LC, Washington DC; Slave Inventory of Paul D. Weston Estate, 1837, Paul D. Weston Papers (microfilm), Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
43.
Winyah Intelligencer, 13 Mar. 1819; Ibid., 6 Feb. 1830 (quote); Ibid., 30 July 1830; Sabe Rutledge, in Slave Narratives, vol. 14, part iv, 65; Gabe Lance, in Slave Narratives, vol. 14, part iii, 91.
44.
Calculations derived from the U.S. Census (see table 5.2).
45.
McDowell, Second Account Book (first quote); Charles C. Pinckney Plantation Book, 1812-1861, Papers of Charles C. Pinckney, LC (second quote); "Appraisement of Slaves ," in Easterby, ed., South Carolina Rice Plantation, 331-2; Plantation Book of William Lowndes; Slave Inventory of Paul D. Weston.
46.
David Doar, Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Low Country ( Charleston, 1936), 37 (first quote); P. C. Weston , in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, ed., Plantation and Frontier, 1649-1863 (New York , 1969), vol. I, 116 (second quote); H.M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, Va., 1914), 29; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community ( Urbana, 1984), 132.
47.
Doar, Rice and Rice Planting, 37 (first quote, italics mine); McDowell, Second Account Book; Mills' Atlas of Georgetown District (surveyed 1820; improved in 1825) ; Weston, in Phillips , ed., Plantation and Frontier, vol. I, 116 (second quote, italics mine).
Calculations based on the census figures listed in Table 5.2; Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ga., 1997), 143 (quote).
50.
List of Weehaw People, 31 Dec. 1855, Henry A. Middleton, Jr., Weehaw Plantation Journal, 1855-1861, Cheves-Middleton Papers, South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS), Charleston, South Carolina; List of Negroes at the White House, May 1858, Julius Izard Pringle, White House Plantation Book, 1857, Pringle Family Papers, SCHS. Larry Hudson has argued that in South Carolina, "when parents lived on different plantations, young eligibles (particularly females) probably felt that they could choose a spouse on either place because both places would have been viewed as home." This would explain why the young slave woman at White House, who was herself the daughter of a broad couple, chose to have a child by a man living on another plantation. See Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold, 149 (quote).
51.
List of Negroes belonging to Friendfield Estate, July 1841, James Ritchie Sparkman Papers, 1822-1865 (microfilm), LSU; Dirleton List of Negroes, 12 Feb. 1859, John Sparkman Plantation Book, 1859-1864 (microfilm), LSU; List of Negroes from Northampton, March 1853, James Ritchie Sparkman Papers; List of Negroes on True Blue Plantation, Emily F. Weston in Equity, 1864 (microfilm), University of North Carolina; List of Working People, January 1860, Paul D. Weston Papers.
52.
Alexander Glennie , in Henry DeSaussure Bull, All Saints' Church, Waccamaw: The Parish, the Place, the People, 1739-1948 ( Columbia, SC, 1949), 32 (first quote); Henry Brown, in Slave Narratives , vol. 14, part i, 118 (second quote); Ben Horry, in Slave Narratives , vol. 14, part ii, 311 (third quote); William Oliver, in Slave Narratives , vol. 14, part iii, 217 (fourth quote); Sabe Rutledge, in Slave Narratives , vol. 14, part iv, 65-70, 68 (fifth quote); Margaret One, in Nancy Rhyne, ed., Voices of Carolina Slave Children (Orangeburg, SC, 1999), 13 (sixth quote); Gabe Lance, in Slave Narratives , vol. 14, part iii, 92 (seventh quote).
53.
Sam Mitchell, in Rhyne , ed., Voices of Carolina Slave Children, 108 (first quote); Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853-1854, with Remarks on their Economy (1856; New York, 1904), vol. 2, 79 (second quote).
54.
List of Weehaw People; List of Negroes belonging to Friendfield Estate; List of Negroes from Northampton; Ben Horry, in Slave Narratives, vol. 14, part ii, 304 (first quote); Dirleton List of Negroes; Pinckney Plantation Book (second quote).
55.
In 1850, only ninety-nine out of 17,894 slaves in Georgetown District were listed as mulatto. In 1860, some 236 out of 17,920 slaves were classified as mulatto. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Population Census, 1850: Georgetown District, South Carolina, Slave Schedules; Ibid., Eighth Population Census, 1860: Georgetown District, South Carolina, Slave Schedules; Ben Horry, in Slave Narratives, vol. 14, part ii, 305 (quote).
56.
Easterby, ed., South Carolina Rice Plantation, 30; Anne Frazier, in Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana, 1997), 53.
