ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Hyde Botume was a northern woman who worked as a teacher of former slaves on the South Carolina Sea Islands after the Emancipation Proclamation. A sympathetic chronicler of the efforts of the former slaves to come to terms with their new circumstances, she was no sentimentalist. Her discussion of marriage reflected both the concern of missionaries like herself to regularize the family relationships of the islanders and the former slaves' identification of Christian marriage with the dignity of freedom and a mark of moral progress—though some of them clearly had difficulty, in white eyes, in grasping its full implications.
