Henry Payne asks for a divorce from his wife, Anna. He avows that Anna's deportment led him to believe "that she would make him an affectionate, dutiful and respectable wife." Soon after their marriage, she "made manifest her evil propensities and conducted herself in the most undutiful & improper manner." Payne claims that Anna neglected her duties in the home and even defiled it "with her own excrement." He also believes that Anna has "prostituted her person." Payne further accuses her of abandoning their "children with the indifference of a brute- attending at no time to them as a mother." The petitioner contends that "these things render the contract of marriage a mere bond of wretchedness to your orator stripping it of every hope of happiness and fastening upon him a woman lost to every sentiment of virtue or self respect." He prays for a divorce and a restoration "of all his proper rights." Reid Payne reveals in his deposition that he has "seen some intimacy between her and People of Colour."
Result: Dismissed.
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Repository: Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
