The True Intent and Meaning of the Marriage Contract: Women, Divorce, and the Westward Expansion of the American State, 1783-1825

From the beginning of the expansion of the United States into the Trans-Appalachian West, the state was concerned with ordering its people's intimate relations. To demonstrate this, this paper utilizes legal codes, divorce petitions, and divorce case files form four states in the Trans-Appalachian West: Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, and Ohio. These case studies reveal many similarities from north to south when it came to the state's interest in Euro-American setters' intimate relations and family structure, and to Euro-Americans' concepts of marriage and sexual intimacy. But they also display many individuals's lack of adherence to sexual monogamy and stable households.

Thus, territorial and state governments felt the need to revise and clarify marriage laws and pass detailed laws on divorce. Divorce laws, by identifying reasons available to petition for a divorce, spelled out norms for a good marriage, including monogamy and reproduction. They also reinforced the state's interest in one marriage norm by giving people second chances to find spouses with whom to form mongamous and stable households. Whether because of abandonment, adultery, or cruel behavior, men and women filed for a divorce in order to reform a spouse, save themselves from hard, or find the happiness denied in a current marriage. These cases, however, opened up people's private lives to public scrutiny by courts and legislatures and reinforced the fact that settlers' family intimate relations were in fact issues of and important ot the state's existence and desire to have knowledge of the people in its territories.