Polygyny without Wives: Paradoxes of Slavery and Marriage in Early America

In 1712, at Ripon Hall in Virginia, a plantation manager reported that an enslaved man called Roger had committed suicide.  The reason the manager recorded for this action was that Roger had been “hindred from Keeping other Negroe Mens wifes besides his owne.” At first glance, this is a puzzling reference, and the desire for what appears to be polygamy is unusual.  I want to explore this episode and its context because it illuminates, in a brief and flickering burst, the rich domestic dramas of communities of enslaved women and men, dramas that mostly remain obscure. Neither slave marriage nor polygamy had any legal standing in colonial British North America.  Yet slave polygamy existed.  To investigate polygamy among enslaved people in this time and place, then, is to look for something that is an impossibility twice over. Polygamy among enslaved people, like polygamy elsewhere in the western world in the early modern period, brings another set of paradoxes.  It is both profoundly conservative and shockingly radical, a choice that harkens back to a much older way of life and yet powerfully undermines the actions of European colonizers.  This paper places these paradoxes at the heart of an exploration of slavery, polygamy, and households, placing women in particular at the center of the analysis.  Historians of West Africa have long recognized that polygamy existed as a widespread practice in nearly all of the parts of West Africa from which enslaved people came. At the same time, historians of especially African-American family life have pondered whether such practices continued in the Americas. Using this literature and a range of primary sources, this paper opens up central issues about domestic slavery, gendered inequalities within communities of the enslaved, anxieties around colonial marriage, and issues of cultural continuity and discontinuity.