Lucretia Chambers, through her next friend Thomas McGinnis, seeks to divorce her husband John Chambers. The petitioner states that after ten months of marriage, John Chambers had become so abusive that she left him and moved to her father's residence. She claims that John, in order "to wound and provoke her feeling assumed to be jealous of her constancy ... and without the slightest foundation charged her with the commission of adultery and other base & unwomanly conduct." In addition, she says he imposed, "as a kind of guardian and mistress, an ignorant filthy negro woman--thus compelling her to submit not only to his own caprices and tyranny, but to the ... oppression & insults of his negro paramour." Maintaining "that never ... did she knowing give him cause for complaint," Lucretia says she "endured his wanton tyranny ... until patience itself ceased to be a virtue, and a separation no crime." Although John "is possessed of an estate worth, probably, five or six thousand dollars," he has failed to provide for her and she asks that, in addition to a divorce, "a separate property for her maintenance may be set apart." In his related answer, John accuses his wife of adultery and of being pregnant by a man other than himself.
Result: Dismissed.
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Repository: County Courthouse, Columbiana, Alabama
