After twenty-eight years of marriage, Lydia Rowden filed for divorce in 1854, claiming that her husband, Isaac, was "raving mad." Though he had gone through periods of lucidity, for many years he had experienced "attacks," she explained, and recently the attacks had become increasingly violent, especially toward his slaves. She begged him to "desist in beating his negros to death," Lydia wrote, "and on more than One occasion has revived them when they were apparently dead." When Isaac took their only son into their front yard and for no apparent reason slit his throat, she fled in terror. Later, she learned that he subsequently placed the corpse on a "scaffold" and burned it as "a sacrafice to God, as Abraham had done with his son Isaac." Not long afterwards, Isaac was committed to the insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia. "Having lost all hope of future hapiness or peace from her union with her present husband, and desiring to be rid of the hazardous and burdensome mockery of a marriage relation which has already given her long years of anguish," Lydia prays for dissolution of the bonds of matrimony.
Result: Dismissed; appealed; affirmed.
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Repository: Talladega County Judicial Building, Talladega, Alabama
