Rebecca Dean asks the court's permission to live separate and apart from her husband, Walter D. A. Dean. Married in 1854, the petitioner asserts that, "by a series of abuse, and cruel treatment since their intermarriage, he has made her life a constant scene of misery and distress." She further confides that he has charged her with not only "having illicit intercourse with different white men in the neighborhood, but also with his own slaves." Rebecca represents that "very recently a negro man Slave named Peter the property of the said Walter D A Dean came to his death by violence" and that "the said Defendant has been charged by the jury of inquest as accessory thereto," whereby the said Walter "is now secreting himself with a view of fleeing the state and removing his property therefrom." The petitioner therefore prays that "a separate maintenance may be decreed to your oratrix" and that "she may be protected in living separate and apart from her husband." She also requests that her husband "be restrained from leaving the state and removing his property therefrom."
Or you may view all people.
Repository: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina
