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Description of  Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War (New Directions In Southern History)

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. Here, the era's clashing valuesslavery and freedom, city and country, industry and agriculturemet and melded. In factories and plantations along the Ohio River, a unique regional identity emerged: one rooted in kinship, tolerance, and compromise. Border families articulated these hybrid values in both the legislative hall and the home. While many defended patriarchal households as an essential part of slaveholding culture, communities on the border pressed for increased mutuality between husbands and wives. Drawing on court records, personal correspondence, and prescriptive literature, Read more