Rethinking the Revolutionary Road to Divorce

Chapter Eight examines the emergence of state legislative action on divorce in the context of transatlantic revolutionary politics, bottom-up pressure from constituents, and sensational cases involving the founding generation’s “first families” and its preeminent legal minds. Blair v. Blair aligned Virginia governor Lord Dunmore and the radical Patrick Henry against Thomas Jefferson, who drafted extensive Notes on Divorce. In conjunction with the English antislavery case Somerset v. Steuart, the conflict prompted the Privy Council’s 1773 ban on colonial divorce legislation. The chapter also discusses cases involving Arthur Lee, printers Isaiah Thomas and Robert Bell, Nancy Shippen Livingston, George and Martha Washington and Ona Judge Staines. These cases have not entered “founding” political narratives because protection of familial and masculine interests usually outweighed political principles. The disclosure of female grievances and family discord was still seen as a greater threat than the grievances themselves. Settlements for white women came at the expense of enslaved families. Antislavery activists and slaveholding states both resisted legal divorce, but for opposite reasons. Opponents of slavery like Anthony Benezet used Christian marital indissolubility to contest the break-up of enslaved families; proponents of slavery used indissoluble marriage and wives’ dependence to justify the perpetual dependence of slaves.

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