Opening Speech Of John Graham Esq To The Jury On The Part Of The Defence On The Trial Of Daniel E Sickes

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Excerpt from Opening Speech of John Graham, Esq., To the Jury, on the Part of the Defence, on the Trial of Daniel E. Sickles, in the Criminal Court of the District of Columbia, Judge Thomas H. Crawford, Presiding: April 9th and 11th, 1859 An interference with the marriage relation must strike every reflecting mind as the greatest wrong that can be committed upon a human being. It has been well said that affliction, shame, poverty, captivity, are preferable; and I do not know that I can express the sentiment more happily than in reciting the lines which the great dramatist has placed in the mouth of the Moor, over the supposed discovery of the inconstancy of his Desdemona. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In nineteenth-century America, the law insisted that marriage was a permanent relationship defined by the husband's authority and the wife's dependence. Yet at the same time the law created the means to escape that relationship. How was this possible? And how did wives and husbands experience marriage within that legal regime? These are the complexities that Hendrik Hartog plumbs in a study of the powers of law and its limits. Exploring a century and a half of marriage through stories of struggle and conflict mined from case records, Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations and spousal identities, and how individuals manipulated and reshaped the rules of the American states to fit their needs. We witness a compelling cast of characters: wives who attempted to leave abusive husbands, women who manipulated their marital status for personal advantage, accidental and intentional bigamists, men who killed their wives' lovers, couples who insisted on divorce in a legal culture that denied them that right. As we watch and listen to these men and women, enmeshed in law and escaping from marriages, we catch reflected images both of ourselves and our parents, of our desires and our anxieties about marriage. Hartog shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.