Christina Stanton seeks a "separate support and maintenance" from her estranged husband, Richard Stanton, whom she married in 1813. Christina claims that, shortly after they were married, Richard began treating her "with the utmost contempt and cruelty, in so much that he appeared to take peculiar pleasure and delight in every thing that could tend to render her life wretched and miserable." His behavior worsened in 1823 when he "hired a negro woman, and sinking himself into the lowest state of human depravity, took up with her as a wife." That same year he dragged Christina "furiously by the hair of her head" and abandoned her with only "the bed on which she lay." He then "tore from her arms her only surviving daughter," keeping her in his "custody." Their daughter later died, taking with her Christina's "means of restoring him to a sense of his duty as a husband and a father." She asks permission to live separately from him and to receive an allowance "out of his property" to counteract her current state of "abject poverty."
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Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
