From an early age, Henry “Box” Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, was warned against forced separation of slave families. Yet, he cast all doubts aside to marry his bride Nancy, even though their marriage was not legal. He tried to buy her freedom, but had to witness her being auctioned off to an unknown place. We meet Henry in historian Tera W. Hunter’s in-depth study of African American marriage in the 19th century. Hunter investigates the manifold challenges that enslaved and free black couples faced when practicing marriage. Henry’s example illustrates how couples actively fought for their intimate unions, yet they were vulnerable due to forces beyond their control.

Hunter’s book is a much-needed contribution to the debate on the status of black families in US history. Hunter sets out to rectify claims that try to explain fragile African American families in the 20th century with the experience of slavery. By working through an impressive load of primary sources, she convincingly shows that black families were much more complex than the normative nuclear family: often matrifocal as mother-child unions were somewhat stronger than father-child bonds due to the economies of slavery. Yet, African Americans created “meaningful bonds of wedlock” (p. 21) throughout the 19th century. Most adult slaves lived in marriage unions and by the 1880s the nuclear family became their prevalent form of cohabitation.

Surprisingly, African-American marriages in the 19th century remain understudied, even though marriage was considered the most important civilizing function in that era. Hunter’s study challenges a large corpus of social-science research since the Progressive Era that problematizes African-American families as deviant and pathological. While most research focused on the absence of fathers and the dominance of mothers, Hunter’s study takes a different approach. She openly asks what constituted marriage for African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction and what ramifications were imposed on them.

Hunter’s narrative follows a chronological order. First, she analyzes the possibilities of black marriages under slavery. Most slaves formed marital unions, but faced extreme challenges since the master was always involved in the union as “third flesh” (p. 6). As co-residential marriages were infrequent and various forms of relationships from “taking up” to arranged marriages existed, slaves were expected to fulfill the gender norms of patriarchal marriage but were “stripped of powers and privileges that underwrote them.” (p. 60)

Reading the famous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision (1858) from the angle of spousal rights, Hunter shows that in legal terms, slavery and marriage were contradictory institutions. Since slaves enjoyed no civil rights, their marriages could not be legal. They could not be prohibited from marrying, but their marriages were not endorsed either. Free black people found out that their freedom was not absolute, since their marriages were often not recognized or they were in mixed marriages with one freed and one enslaved partner. Divorce cases were extremely rare but showed that black couples struggled with the same problems as any couple, in addition to racial subjugation.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, African Americans in contraband camps rushed to renew their wedding vows “under the flag” (p. 121). While missionaries insisted that couples legalize their unions when cohabitating in order to overcome the perceived immoralities of slavery, investors had economic interests in maintaining the plantation system. Through legalizing their marriages, black men became heads of households, but society did not grant their wives the status of “ladyhood” (p. 149), since they had to participate in the labor force. Motions to regularize marriages along the lines of bourgeois patriarchy stood in contrast to economic needs.

Congressional Debates about enlisting black men as soldiers and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were closely intertwined with the question of marriages, since their wives and children would become eligible for widow pensions. In the final stages of the war, even the Confederate Army promised to black men that upon enlisting their families would be freed. These policies confirmed new gender hierarchies: men could earn a path to citizenship through being soldiers, while women earned freedom through marriage and kinship.

In the Reconstruction Era, former slaves tried to reunite with their loved ones. Letter writing became a semi-public practice when needed to state pension claims. Conflicts arose over the custody of children born outside of legalized marriages. Black men became heads of households without enjoying the privileges of patriarchy since their wages could not fully provide for their families. Yet, the sharecropping system favored nuclear families over extended kinship unions, and homemaking and serial monogamy was often a rational choice for wives.

Pension records show the difficulties that arose from legalized slave unions, as wives and children of non-recognized unions often lost pension claims. Women also lost all claims when they entered into a new sexual relationship. In the Progressive Era, reformers such as W.E.B. Du Bois saw domesticity as a path to citizenship and placed a special burden on women to maintain that domesticity. Hunter concludes her comprehensive study by demonstrating that in the 1890s marriage and remarriage rates among black people were actually higher than among white people. She argues convincingly that structural racism and economic disadvantage destabilized black unions throughout the 20th century.

Hunter’s study is a fascinating read and an important contribution to the debate on black families. She works through an impressive amount of primary source material ranging from historical court cases, personal letters, pension records, congressional debates, government and missionary records, newspaper reports and military documents. Though she never offers a concise definition of patriarchy, her analysis is best when it distills from court cases and pension claims how mechanisms of patriarchy and racism worked hand in hand. They helped to make the master present in slave marriages, granted freed men only partial powers as head of household and moved control over women’s lives from owners to husbands. She shows the prevalence of the patriarchal nuclear family as the hegemonic ideal against which African-American unions were measured throughout the 19th century.

At the same time, Hunter gives African-American husbands and wives a voice of their own by quoting their letters and retelling their family histories. Hunter’s study thus serves as a primary example how to narrate of family history from the bottom-up perspective and how to extract the agency of individual marginalized actors and their endeavors to maintain meaningful unions against all odds.

The book is an important reading, not only for those historians interested in family and gender relations. It also sheds lights on how notions of marriage were intertwined with important political and military decisions during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as Hunter gives us a new reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Dred Scott ruling. Hunter’s study is a significant contribution to the cultural and political history of the 19th century United States as it shows the entanglements of the seemingly private matter of marriage with legal, political and military decision-making at the highest sphere.