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Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress (review)

Catastrophe lacks the perspective that a comparison with other states’ divorce laws and procedures, ranging from South Carolina’s absolute prohibition of divorce to Indiana’s wide-open permissiveness, would have given it. Yet, Buckley’s analysis, sensitive as it is to gender-determined differences shaping the grounds for, and success of, divorce petitions, implicitly challenges Basch’s argument that the shift from legislative to judicial proceedings and the enactment of speciac grounds for divorce— most commonly adultery or desertion—provided women a more sympathetic forum than the lobbying and political processes that had previously made divorce largely a male prerogative. In Virginia, however, Buckley ands that more women than men petitioned the legislature for divorce and that the success rate for each sex was an identical 33 percent. Although he refers to several sociological and psychological theories that might explain the roots of antebellum marital violence, Buckley makes no convincing case for any of them. Rather, as he does with the statistics that establish the boundaries of his subject, he subordinates theory to the mining of ofacial documents and, to a lesser degree, private letters to elucidate the experience of individual petitioners and the rationales that their supporters and opponents used. The narrative of Sally McDowell Thomas’ marriage, divorce, and second marriage illustrates the cogency of this method. The daughter of a Virginia governor, Sally married a governor of Maryland whose tawdry, perhaps insane, attacks on her alleged behavior roused popular indignation and propelled the legislature to speed the divorce on which her father insisted to shield family honor. Even so, the social stigma of being a divorced woman so burdened her that she almost rejected a deeply affectionate marriage to an eminently respectable Presbyterian cleric. Buckley uses that tale to condemn the “‘ladies,’ who were the guardians of antebellum propriety . . . [upholding] the social conservatism embedded in the foundations of southern culture” (263). But the ladies were not the ones who denied divorce to 67 percent of those who petitioned the legislature for relief.