ABSTRACT
Eliza Patterson filed a divorce petition from her husband Alexander Patterson of Key West, to the Honorable Legislative Counsel for Territory of Florida on December 8, 1836. Eliza claimed her husband was embroiled in illicit sex and “criminal connection” with a seventeen-year-old girl who had moved into the marital home, which undermined her status as a wife and mother of their children. Eliza Patterson’s case was far from unique. The arguments raised in her petition, particularly the need for provision and protection, were common in nineteenth-century divorce petitions. The divorce petitions submitted by men and women reflected the growing social anxieties in the decades building up to and culminating in the Civil War and its aftermath that partially hinged on white men’s desire to ‘protect’ Southern white womanhood from the imagined lascivious assault of black masculinity. The chapter draws on research that investigates race, gender and marital discord, including interracial sex between white men or women and their enslaved property.
