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Book Review
| Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 346. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2712-6); $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-8078-5380-1).
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| Thomas Buckley taps an underused set of public records to delve into the most private matters of ordinary people—their emotional and sexual lives within and outside marriage. He quantifies and reads closely the 583 petitions for divorce submitted to the Virginia General Assembly from 1786 until 1851 to address the literature in three fields: (1) the legal and intellectual history of divorce reform, (2) the gendered history of patriarchy and domesticity, and (3) the social and cultural history of race, sex, and community. |
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First, Buckley chronicles the interplay of conservative and reform ideology and policy over the period. Rationalists like St. George Tucker held that marriage represented a civil contract in common law. More typical was the Christian outlook of his son, Henry St. George Tucker, who saw marriage as a sacred bond upon which rested the entire moral social order, and not just individual happiness. The legislature's reluctance to liberalize either the grounds or procedures for divorce was underpinned by this moral understanding of marriage and, more specifically, by English ecclesiastical law. Taking for granted the permanence of sacred vows, legislators did not enact a general divorce law until 1827 and strictly limited the courts' role. As late as 1848, drafters of the revised divorce code still relied heavily on Anglican canon law. Legislators did strike ecclesiastical references from the final 1849 code, and the 1851 Constitution shifted all divorce authority to the courts. But Buckley warns us that this was no liberalizing move. The courts were by now more conservative than the General Assembly, which had begun acting more sympathetically (though idiosyncratically) toward the growing number of divorce petitions—approving 45 percent after 1840 versus 20 percent before (270). These petitioners—both in their numbers and in their language—challenged legislators' notion that individual pursuits of happiness were less important than the social order, and these are Buckley's main subjects. |
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In the realm of gender and domestic relations, Buckley's findings might surprise some. Not only did women feel emboldened enough to bring their cases to the legislature in higher numbers than men (242 women, 218 men, 5 couples), but the legislature granted women divorces in equal proportions to male petitioners, 33 percent each overall (4, 271). While men did enjoy certain prerogatives, legislators did not necessarily believe men's testimony over that of women and did not automatically condone men's patriarchal practices of domestic violence and sexual freedom. Men and women both played to the white male legislators' sense of what made a viable marriage and what therefore might viably justify its undoing. Both women and men—at all class levels—frequently found recourse to notions of companionate marriage rather than crass patriarchy. Here Buckley's work resonates with that of Anya Jabour, Kathleen M. Brown, Jan Lewis, Jane Turner Censer, Laura F. Edwards, Amy Dru Stanley, and others emphasizing the tensions between patriarchal and companionate modes of marriage present in both south and north. In detailed case studies, Buckley illustrates clearly how a man might shift rhetorical tactics from companionate to patriarchal, or how a wife's counter-petitions might undercut his sentimental rhetoric with accounts of his violent behavior. |
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Buckley firmly establishes the local community context within which divorces played out. He argues, in fact, with qualified success, that "local authority lodged in families, neighborhoods, and communities"—as opposed to state authority vested in the legislature—"held the preponderance of social power in the Old South" (81). Unsuccessful petitioners might gain community sanction to separate and perhaps even remarry illegally. But more often, local standards proved as restricting as the legislators'. Parents and other interested family members often counseled wives to reconcile even in the face of physical abuse and adultery. Marriage was a sacred community value. And, as his detailed case study of Sally McDowell Thomas makes painfully clear, divorce created barriers to renewed social life, especially for women. |
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Given his subject—the legal marriage and divorce of white people—Buckley pays surprising and refreshing attention to race and slavery, though largely from white people's perspectives. His brief treatment of enslaved spouses' lack of legal standing—and churches' dilemma in recognizing remarried couples after spouses were sold away—fits nicely here. He also shows how racial and sexual relations played out among a host of mitigating and complicating factors within local communities (complexities explored further in Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003]). |
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Great Catastrophe is a superb state study that enriches enormously our understanding not only of the texture of married life and divorce among white Virginians, but also of their interactions with and influence upon state policy. However, its limited engagement with the literature on other states and regions leads it to assert rather than demonstrate that white Virginians' ideas, practices, and legal codes were peculiarly "Southern"—uniform with other southern states and divergent from northern or northwestern ones. Buckley also forwards certain arguments without evidentiary support. The conservative impact of the 1851 end of legislative divorce is intriguing, and it nicely undercuts what could have been an unproblematically progressive narrative. But Buckley's richly detailed case studies necessarily end at that important juncture. Judicial divorce is a topic perhaps wisely left for another book, and given Buckley's talent for capturing this legal history in local communities, we would be grateful to have it from him. |
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| Phillip Troutman
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| Mellon Lecturing Fellow, Duke University |
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