In 1943, Mary Ritter Beard argued that women’s rights activists and later scholars too readily accepted Sir William Blackstone’s definition of coverture as the description of married women’s legal status. Her point has resonance nearly a century later, as I argue in “Law, Women, and ‘Woman’:  Women’s History and Legal History,” part of a forum on women’s history in the summer 2026 edition of the Journal of the Early Republic. While coverture’s basic precepts gave husbands authority over the property of women they married, including outright ownership of their personal property, the range of principles associated with the concept were not as rigid or as well defined as they appeared in Blackstone’s Commentaries. The principles of coverture, moreover, were not the only ones available. There were others that recognized married women’s ability to control and manage property.^[i]

I have been thinking and writing about this issue for a long time and have amassed lots of examples of the ways in which women and their families shaped the meaning of coverture, bending elements of it to suit their own needs or sidestepping its restrictions altogether by using other legal principles.[ii] Chipping away at established views of coverture, however, is difficult because of the evidentiary record, dominated by the publications penned by the early republic’s legal professionals, which makes it seem as if Blackstone’s version of coverture was an accurate rendering of women’s legal status, based in past practices. Historians have tended to accept the claims of those texts, rather than the practices on the ground, which tell a different story.

Here, I want to share an example of that sleight of hand, involving John Faucheraud Grimké. Best known as the father of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina, Grimké was a Revolutionary leader and a prominent lawyer, judge, legislator, and legal writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina. As a descendant of wealthy Huguenot families that regularly passed family property through female relatives with written instruments that, in some instances, gave women extensive power over that property, Grimké was well versed in legal practices outside coverture.[iii] The family’s strategies were rooted in Continental legal traditions, but not exclusive to them. A wide range of people in South Carolina, including those with roots in Great Britain, adopted the same kinds of legal arrangements. They were particularly popular among the low country elite, who wanted to keep their property in the hands of their own family members, although they were used by those of modest means as well.[iv] Angelina Grimké followed these practices when she set up a separate estate before her marriage to Theodore Dwight Weld. The terms of that arrangement gave her managerial control that she later used to give all her funds back to Weld and the abolitionist cause.[v]

Mrs. John Faucheraud Grimké (Mary Moore Smith), wife of John Grimké. From Wikimedia Commons (original at the Gibbes Museum of Art).

John Faucheraud Grimké, however, repudiated his family’s legal past, characterizing those practices as outside the law and, hence, unenforceable. That was the argument he made in a splashy suit against his mother’s estate. According to Grimké, his father had promised a sizeable legacy to him informally, which his father’s estate could not cover, but his mother’s estate could. The claim on his father’s estate was already dubious, given that his father made no mention of the promised legacy in his will. His claim on his mother’s estate, to the extent he had any, was complicated by the fact that her property was her separate estate, outlined in documents that allowed her to leave the property to whomever she wanted. She had done just that and willed it to her daughters. Ignoring his mother’s wishes, Grimké insisted that her estate should cover the unkept promises of his father. To make his case, he came out swinging with Blackstone, arguing that his mother’s property had never belonged to her. It could only belong to her husband, his father, because of coverture. Grimké knew that his claims conflicted with established, enforceable legal practices followed in his own family and many others. Grimké’s arguments were only partially successful for that reason. Significantly, though, the judge accepted his general arguments about coverture, even though the case was heard in the Court of Equity, where other rules applied. ^[vi]

Like so many litigants, Grimké mobilized legal arguments that served his purposes in the case against his mother’s estate. But his embrace of Blackstone did not end there. Grimké later published a treatise entitled “The Duty of Executors and Administrators,” that purported to offer readers practical advice necessary to navigate the laws of South Carolina. Those laws, as Grimké claimed, were based in “Mr. Blackstone’s rules.” His treatise joined others that characterized what Blackstone wrote, particularly on coverture, as the way it had always been.^[vii] When evaluating these historical claims, historians should proceed with caution. What these writers said was history missed the mark—in the case of John Faucheraud Grimké, it was not even close.

Endnotes

[i] Mary Ritter Beard, Women as Force in History: A –Study of Traditions and Realities (New York, 1946).  For the fluidity of coverture, see Holly Brewer, “The Transformation of Domestic Law,” in Cambridge History of American Law, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Michael Grossberg, (New York, 2008), 1: 288–323.  For the adoption of Blackstone, see Laura F. Edwards, “The Material Conditions of Dependency: The Hidden History of Free Women’s Control of Property in the Early Nineteenth Century South,” in Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, ed. Sally Hadden and Patricia Minter (Athens, GA, 2013), 171–92.

[ii] See, for instance, Laura F. Edwards, “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (Dec. 2019), 504–23 and Only the Clothes on Her Back:  Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth Century United States (New York, 2022).

[iii] For examples of wills, see Will of John Paul Grimké, Charleston, 12 July 1785, Wills, Vol. 24, 1786–1793, 833-36, in Ancestry.com. South Carolina, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980; Marie Villepontoux Faucheraud, Will, 27 May 1763, Charleston, Wills, Vol. 11–13, 1767–1771, 770–75, in Ancestry.com. South Carolina, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980; Gideon Faucheraud, Will, 27 December 1753, Charleston, Wills, Vol. 7–8, 1752–1763, 108–11, in Ancestry.com. South Carolina, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980.

[iv] Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986) emphasized the commonality of those practices.  More recently, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT, 2019) has expanded on the implications of these arrangements in solidifying slavery.

[v] For the trust and her later divestment of it, see Isaac S. Loyd to Angelina Grimké, 14 May 1838, Folder 13, Box 3, Clements Library, University of Michigan. Later, Angelina’s sister, Sarah, willed property to Angelian in a separate estate; see Frederick Grimké to Sarah Moore Grimké, 13 March 1858, Folder 20, Box 5, Clements Library, University of Michigan.

[vi] Grimké v. Grimké’s Ex’rs, Court of Chancery of South Carolina, 1 June 1794, 1 Des. 366, 1 S.C. Eq. 366, 1794 WL 318.

[vii] John Fauchereaud Grimké, The Duty of Executors and Administrators (New York, 1797).  For the treatises that duplicated Blackstone, see Edwards, Only the Clothes, ch. 2.