Married in 1826, Martha S. Evans seeks a divorce, charging her husband David Evans with abuse, adultery, and numerous assaults. In one incident, in 1832, when she discovered him "in the act of attempting to gratify his criminal desires on a negro woman" by force, Martha attempted to intervene. The petitioner's husband seized her, she recounts, "and inflicted on her such a beating that she was nearly helpless for a week." His only regret, he said the next morning, was that he had not killed her.
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Repository: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina
