Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. The end of a marriage: it seemed an almost perfect metaphor to the worldly Mary Boykin Chesnut. As she surveyed the Union (uppercase) splitting apart, with North and South hurling bitter recriminations at each other, they reminded her of nothing so much as a long-married, long-quarreling husband and wife whose union (lowercase) had finally gone asunder.  Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.  “We separated North and South because of incompatibility of temper,” the South Carolina diarist wrote in March 1861. “We are divorced because we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a ‘separation à l’agréable,’ as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.”  Chesnut was not the only American to whom such comparisons occurred during the early months of 1861. The New York journalist John O’Sullivan likewise compared the sectional crisis to a “divorce for incompatibility of temper and interests” in which “it will be better … to part in peace” than to launch a bloody civil war. A Unionist orator, on the other hand, compared the disagreements between North and South to “occasional bickerings between husband and wife, which ought not to lead to an immediate divorce.”  Even Abraham Lincoln took up the comparison. In February, on the first day of his train journey to the capital, the president-elect gave a speech in which he accused secessionists of viewing the bond between states as “no regular marriage, but a sort of free love arrangement, to be maintained [merely] by passional attraction.” This public allusion to Southerners as sexual profligates was criticized, even among some Republicans, as being off-color – certainly beneath the dignity of the nation’s chief executive. (Lincoln’s closest associates, on the other hand, knew that he was capable of much bawdier humor than this.)  Yet divorce was no mere metaphor on the eve of the Civil War. In fact, it was a volatile political issue, one that occasionally seemed to divide the nation as sharply as the slavery question did. In early 1861, the question of when – or even whether – a man and woman should be permitted to end their marriage was being hotly debated by many of the same legislators, journalists and activists who were also arguing over national disunion. Like slavery and secession, divorce was an issue involving civil rights, moral responsibilities and conflicts over state and federal authority. It was a controversy that, in many ways, foreshadowed present-day debates over marriage laws and rights.  American divorce laws in the mid-19th century were a complicated patchwork that varied widely – and, it seemed to many people, unjustly and illogically – from state to state. Was sexual infidelity sufficient reason for divorce? (And should adulterous husbands be penalized the same as unfaithful wives?) What about physical abuse? (And how severely must a husband beat his wife before the law could intervene?) It often seemed that no two courts or legislatures agreed on such matters.  In most states in the early 19th century, an act of the legislature was required to end a marriage – and the process of obtaining one could be long, expensive and publicly humiliating, which discouraged all but the most desperately unhappy spouses. But by the 1850s, this was beginning to change, and in some states, divorces could be obtained unobtrusively in court.  During the 1850s, Indiana was widely condemned as a Midwestern Sodom for its relatively lax statutes. Couples there obtained divorces on any grounds that a judge ruled “proper” – attracting a flood of applicants from out of state. The editor Horace Greeley lambasted the Hoosier State as “the paradise of free-lovers” whose example would soon lead to “a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.” (In 1859, its legislature finally voted to require a year’s residency before allowing a divorce suit to be heard.)  South Carolina stood at the other extreme. Since the Revolution, the Palmetto State had refused to permit divorce for any reason whatsoever. Although a court might, very rarely, grant an annulment, most disgruntled spouses had no recourse except to abandon each other. (In fact, South Carolina did not pass its first divorce statute until 1949.) In many states, including New York, divorce was often only granted on condition that neither spouse could remarry – which was supposed to safeguard public morality by ensuring that no one could trade in an old partner for a new one. In North Carolina, the “guilty party” was forbidden to remarry during the lifetime of the “innocent party.”  On March 14, 1861, The New York Times’ editors considered these nationwide discrepancies in the fresh light of the secession crisis. In an editorial entitled “Is Democracy a Failure?”, they asked whether “our Government has, after all, ever been a Republic? … We have laws as different in our States as in the various countries of Europe. … The mere subject of divorce, with its contradictions, has more than once been pointed out by writers as entirely inconsistent with the idea of a stable and harmonious Government.”  Indeed, the paper’s news columns offered almost daily examples of such legal capriciousness. On Jan. 19, 1861, a New York City judge refused to grant a divorce to a wife whose husband had beaten her unconscious in an argument over letting the family dog sleep on the bed – and, on a later occasion, tried to strike her with a wooden stick. The judge admonished the couple that a mere “one or two acts of cruel treatment” were not proper grounds for divorce, and that “the wife should not seek on slight provocation to dissolve that sacred tie which binds her to her husband for life, for better or worse.” The Times, quoting the New Testament, headlined its article “Wives be Obedient Unto Your Husbands.” The following month, another headline asked flippantly, “Is a Black Eye Sufficient Ground for Divorce?” (The article also mentioned that the husband had tried to cut his wife’s throat with a knife.)  An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.  Often, indeed, the paper’s editors played spousal abuse for laughs. An article on Feb. 12, 1861 was headlined “Action for Divorce – No Happiness Without Beefsteak,” and suggested that a wife had filed for divorce because her husband had failed to supply her with sufficient luxuries, like red meat. Only farther down in the story did it emerge that the he had also “used personal violence to the plaintiff on a number of occasions.”  Such stories were no laughing matter to activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For her and others, the American legal system’s unjust treatment of women was inextricably entwined with its oppression of African-American slaves.  In February 1861, in fact, Stanton traveled to Albany, N.Y., to fight for the twin causes of abolitionism and liberalized divorce. Early that month, she arrived in the capital to take part in a statewide antislavery convention. That same week, she was allowed to testify before the New York State Senate’s judiciary committee on behalf of a bill that would – very slightly – relax the state’s stringent divorce code. Similar legislative debates were held that winter and spring in Ohio, Massachusetts and elsewhere.  Some months earlier, in the pages of the abolitionist magazine The Liberator, Stanton had compared the struggle over divorce law to the struggle over slavery. “We decide the whole question of slavery by settling the sacred rights of the individual,” she wrote. Surely, marriage and divorce also involved fundamental questions of individual liberties, human rights and free will.  Not all abolitionists – even those sympathetic to women’s rights – agreed with Stanton. Wendell Phillips, the antislavery leader, admonished her that it was politically “premature and unwise” to take on such a controversial issue. Stanton reminded him that only a few decades earlier, most people had said the same thing about slavery.  A few women went even further than Stanton, however. In another issue of The Liberator, in December 1860, the “free love” advocate Caroline Hinckley wrote: “Persons should be left free to unite as they please – to themselves decide what is and is not marriage – to marry permanently or temporarily – and to separate when they themselves feel called upon thus to do.”  It then occurred to Hinckley that her argument had certain logical implications that went beyond literal marriage into other, even more contentious debates. “I see not why a State or an individual who desires to withdraw from a compact should not have the right to do so,” she concluded. “So I say to-day to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, if you don’t like the Union, peaceably leave it.”  Join Disunion on Facebook »  Sources: Mary Boykin Chesnut, “A Diary from Dixie”; The New York Times, Jan. 12 and 19, Feb. 12, 13 and 19, and March 14, 1861; New York Herald, March 18, 1861; Glenda Riley, “Divorce: An American Tradition”; Norma Basch, “Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians”; Bennie Goldin, “In and Out of Marriage: An Historical Survey”; Paul H. Jacobson, “Marital Dissolutions in New York State in Relation to Their Trend in the United States” (Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Jan. 1950); Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Candida Smith, eds., “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker”; Sue Davis, “The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton”; The Liberator, June 1, Nov. 16, and Dec. 7, 1860 and March 22, 1861.  Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
A century and a half ago, disunion took on multiple meanings - as Americans fought battles over marriage alongside the struggle over secession.