The refusal of states to recognize the marriages of enslaved people legally was among slavery’s most significant cruelties, mocking deep ties of affection among the enslaved as pretenses unworthy of acknowledgement by white people or the law. As Hunter demonstrates in Bound in Wedlock, however, the lack of legal sanction for slave marriages was, in important ways, the fundamental precondition for maintaining chattel slavery as an inheritable and permanent condition in the United States. Marriage was a legitimate contract; allowing slaves to enter into it and make legally sustainable claims to their families was incompatible with the prerogatives of slaveholding, especially regarding the reproductive capacities of enslaved women. Slaveholders destroyed one in every three first marriages among enslaved people. Marriages between enslaved people and free people of color, which Hunter refers to as “mixed-status marriages,” were equally at the mercy of white people and the vagaries of the law....

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