In August 1619, a Dutch man-of-war came to Virginia shores with about twenty Africans. The Virginia colony was starved for labor. The sailors were starved for food, and so it began.
By 1850, the US census reported over 3.6 million black and mulatto people. In all that time and among all those people, there were technically very few brides. Because technically speaking, there was no such thing as a slave marriage. There were free blacks and they had brides, but only 11% of that 3.6 million were free, so for most little black girls, the future did not hold a white dress, a ring, or a handsome groom.
The absence of slave marriage was not just an unfortunate happenstance, it was foundational to maintaining chattel slavery at all. And yet a great many slaves said they were married. In this episode I discusses what they meant by marriage, why it had no legal validity, how that changed during and after the Civil War, and how Mildred and Richard Loving broke down the interracial marriage ban in the 20th century.
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