Rachael T. and Sherod Sanders were married in Franklin County, North Carolina, in late 1814 or early 1815. Now, thirty-five years later, she found her husband "guilty of the grossest and most disgraceful adultery" with a twenty-five-year-old woman, Carolina Manuel, who had two children by Sherod and one by a previous marriage. Rachael charges that not only did Sherod treat her with "personal violence," but on one occasion he threw her out of a door and on another threatened to shoot their thirty-three-year-old son William if he attempted to interfere. "I'll be damned, if I don't stand up to her," he told a neighbor, "if it cost me every negro, horse, hog or piece of property I have in the world." At the time of their marriage, Rachael explains, her father gave her in a separate trust "a small negro girl named Barbary" who subsequently had thirteen children. In addition, when her father died about 1829, he bequeathed her two young slaves, David and Henry, now adults in their early thirties. At the time of their marriage, Sherod possessed only fifty acres of land. Over the years, the couple has more slaves, as well as horses, mules, cows, sheep, hogs, and a two thousand-acre plantation. Rachael asks for a divorce and a "decree in reference to their property."
Result: Abated.
Or you may view all people.
Repository: Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama
