“Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century"

Dr. Tera W. Hunter, Princeton University

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage.

Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University, a specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories. Hunter has written two award-winning books. Her first book, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), examines working-class black women in the South and their struggle to achieve freedom, equality, and earn a living against the backdrop of racial oppression, sexual exploitation, and class conflict. Her most recent book, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), examines strategies African Americans used to assert their unions despite the reality of them not being legally recognized until after the Civil War.