ABSTRACT
Unions and disunions worked on many different levels in the nineteenth century. The US Civil War of 1861–1865 wrenched the whole country apart and the American Union survived only because of the Northern (Unionist) victory, after which the defeated Southern states lost their dream of a new Confederate United States. They subsequently had to endure being forced back into a Union they had wanted to leave because of their desire for continued slaveholding and increased states’ rights. Such meta-narratives of union and disunion are well known, but this chapter approaches the meanings of union and disunion through people’s intimate lives at a time of national upheaval. The chapter focusses on enslaved people in the US South, mostly those from South Carolina, who experienced the war first hand. It explores the way in which enslaved people in the Southern states of the United States negotiated their marriages in late antebellum times and during the era of the Civil War and emancipation. The institution of slavery unsurprisingly caused problems for enslaved people’s marriages and meant that a state of union could easily tip over unto disunion. War exacerbated spousal antagonisms and conflicts, as well as providing men and women with different routes to freedom. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the ways in which emancipation in 1865 affected the marital relationships of formerly enslaved people. The majority chose to validate their marriages under American law as they could now legally do so, while others linked personal freedom with the wider process of emancipation and chose to leave those to whom they were unhappily wed. Individual manifestations of union and disunion hence replicated in microcosm the broader upheavals endured by the United States as a whole.
