John Blassingame points out that thousands of slaves were married in Southern churches

John Blassingame points out that thousands of slaves were married in Southern churches

Michael T. Griffith

2006

@All Rights Reserved

Abolition doubts notwithstanding, thousands of slaves were married in Southern churches between 1800 and 1860. For example, out of a total of 1,228 marriages performed in Episcopal churches in South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia in 1860, at least 460, or 38.1 percent, were slave weddings. At many times between 1830 and 1860 more slaves were married in the Episcopal churches in some states than were whites. Between 1841 and 1860 Episcopal ministers performed 3,225 weddings in South Carolina; 1,705, or 52 percent, of these were slave marriages. (The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 169)

Contrary to the portrayals often given in textbooks and documentaries, most slave marriages and slave families were not broken up by their masters.  "A study of wills and advertisements," says Francis Butler Simkins, "shows that many masters" stipulated that their slaves "were not to be sold away from their families or transported out of the state" (A History of the South, Third Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, 1963, p. 123). As mentioned, even a strongly pro-Northern historian like McPherson acknowledges that 66 to 80 percent of slave marriages were not broken up by their masters.  Fogel and Engerman note that information from the slave market in New Orleans, which was the largest of the markets, refutes the claim that masters frequently broke up slave marriages:

Data contained in the sales records in New Orleans, by far the largest market in the interregional slave trade, sharply contradict the popular view that the destruction of slave marriages was at least a frequent, if not a universal, consequence of the slave trade.  These records, which cover thousands of transactions during the years from 1804 to 1862, indicate that more than 84 percent of all sales over the age of fourteen involved unmarried individuals.  Of those who were or had been married, 6 percent were sold with their mates; and probably at least one quarter of the remainder were widowed or voluntarily separated.  Hence, it is likely that 13 percent, or less, of interregional sales resulted in the destruction of marriages. . . .  the New Orleans data show that slaveowners were averse to breaking up black families. . . . (Time on the Cross, pp. 49, 52)

When circumstances led to the separation of a slave family, some owners and others tried to help the family in any way they could. Notes Gutman,

The separation of slave family members by sale or for other reasons led some sensitive owners to encourage contact between them. . . .

Overt expressions of slave familial feelings deeply affected some owners and other whites who came into contact with these slaves. Whites intervened sometimes to prevent the sale of slaves. After a hired Virginia slave was sold and separated from his family because he had not earned enough, whites who attended church with the man raised sufficient cash to buy him from a trader. Their slave grandmother persuaded a Kentucky clergyman to bid for two teen-aged sisters threatened with a distant sale, but a trader outbid him. The purchase of Mima and her children by an Alexandria slave-trading firm led the hard-pressed Virginian Richard H. Carter, who owned Mima's husband, to try to buy them "because of the distress . . . on account of the separation". . . . (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, pp. 287-288)