Tera Hunter begins her powerful and impeccably researched book about black marriage with two images. The first is a photograph of Hunter's great-great grandparents’ marriage license. The second is a family tree, tracing eight generations of Hunters. The choice to begin her book on a personal note makes two key points: first, this is a living history. By uniting genealogy with history, Hunter effectively—and affectively—connects the legacy of slavery with the present moment. Second, the image of her family tree, which includes white slave owners alongside enslaved and free people of color, highlights the sexual economy of slavery, as well as the vital significance of marriage between people of color. Hunter's great-great grandparents, Ellen Morrison and Moses Hunter, were the first intraracial couple in her family's known lineage. When the two were married in 1873, less than a decade after the Civil War ended, marriage was often the first civil right that free people claimed.

While Hunter's book is not primarily about Christianity, her findings should be of interest to all scholars studying the relationship among Christianity, race, and gender. Hunter defines marriage broadly, “as it was understood during and after slavery” (7). By including “committed conjugal relationships, whether legal or nor, monogamous, bigamous, polygamous, or serial[,]” Hunter intentionally moves beyond both Christian and legal definitions of marriage. The broad umbrella is necessary for examining a practice that was, by law, forbidden for most people of African descent for nearly two centuries.

The denial of legal marriage was central to the codification of slavery in colonial North America and the early US, as Hunter shows in chapters 1 and 2. In 1643, a Virginia law categorized African women as “tithable” labor, a technicality that “imposed economic constraints on black couples” (64). A 1662 law passed slave status from mother to child, meaning that “African slaves became legally kinless” by giving “priority to the rights of slave-owners above the familial rights of slaves” (65). These two laws, which focused on black women's reproductive labor, made slavery heritable by denying enslaved people the right of marriage. Black men and women responded to these devastating circumstances by creating a variety of intimate arrangements, including “sweethearting” and “taking up,” as well as marriage. Despite all efforts, however, many couples were broken up against their will, leading some enslaved to reject marriage altogether.

While slave marriage was legally forbidden, marriage between free blacks remained precarious. Chapter 3 shows how free blacks were faced with “an avalanche of restrictive legislation, psychological assaults, and physical threats” (87). Gradual emancipation in the North was difficult for children, while manumission made marriage more difficult in the south, where some states outlawed mixed-status marriage. Some free people even petitioned for voluntary slavery in order to remain with their families.

During the Civil War, African Americans were able to formalize slave marriages for the first time. Chapter 4 shows how the flag became a powerful symbol for ex-slaves. The opportunity to legalize marriage represented the promise of respectability but it also became part of a “civilizing” process that did not appeal to all former slaves. Thus while legal marriage offered opportunities, it also created new hierarchies, and outlawed some practices that had been common under slavery.

Marriage was central to congressional debates during the Civil War, as Hunter demonstrates in chapter 5. In 1862, Congress passed the Militia Act of 1862, which encouraged black soldiers to enlist and also provided pensions to widows of black soldiers. The law offered new legal protections but also “instantiated gender inequities,” as it privileges freedmen over freedwomen.

After the war, African Americans tried to find lost loved ones. It was the “most urgent concern” for black men and women, as Hunter documents in chapter 6, “Reconstructing Intimacies.” The following chapter, “The Most Cruel Wrongs,” shows the darker side of marriage law. During Reconstruction, black marriages were legally recognized, but African Americans were held to higher standards for marriage than their white counterparts, and black women were forced into the impossible position of working outside the home while also upholding the ideal of female domesticity.

Marriage was a tool of governance as well as a right that was cherished. Yet by the end of the nineteenth-century, both whites and elite blacks perceived black marriage to be deficient. In The American Negro Family, W.E.B. DuBois concluded that “legal, monogamous, Christian marriage was the route out of racial oppression” (296). In reality, blacks actually married at higher rates than whites, but they were judged by different standards.

Throughout her monograph, Hunter is attentive to both the religious and civil aspects of marriage. For those interested in church history, Christians can be found on many different sides of the debates about black marriage. In Hunter's telling, Christianity is most often associated with proslavery ideology and the oppressive and often punitive ideals of “civility.” During the Civil War, for example, proslavery politicians sought to salvage slave law by promoting slave marriages to more closely align with biblical precedent. After emancipation, white missionaries and African American churches promoted the ideal of Christian marriage. Their efforts were welcomed by some but resented by others.

Overall, Hunter's book does an excellent job balancing the many meanings of marriage. She shows how marriage was central to law in ways that perpetuated first slavery and then racism. Yet marriage was also deeply meaningful to many African Americans. The result of Hunter's study is a rich and nuanced portrait that shows the centrality of marriage to both people and governance.