Am I a Woman That I Should Hoe Corn? Marriage As Imperialism, Marriage As Resistance

"Am I a woman that I should hoe corn?" Marriage as Imperialism, Marriage as Resistance, Dakota Country, 1835-1845

Between February 1837 and January 1838, Mary Ann Longley bore repeated witness to the importance of marriage among the numerous communities of the Upper Midwest. Her own marriage to Ohio-born clergyman Stephen Riggs on February 16, 1837, began the process – Riggs had contracted to take up mission work among the Dakota at Lac qui Parle, 300 miles west of Fort Snelling. The newlywed couple arrived at that Fort on June 1, 1837, and on June 24, Stephen gave a closing prayer at the Christian marriage of Philander Prescott, a trader, to Nah-he-no-Wenah, his Dakota companion of many years. It was September before the Riggses reached their own mission station, and there, on November 1, Stephen presided over the marriage of missionaries Sarah Poage and Gideon Pond. There were still more marriages in the offing: on December 25, Big Thunder's son was married to Sparkling Iron in the Dakota village near Mary's home, and on January 11, 1838, the daughter of trader Joseph Renville married a French fur trader in a ceremony conducted entirely in Dakota and French.[1]

Mary was witness to the fact that marriage – an economic and almost always sexual partnership sealed by the exchange of goods, homes, vows, and sometimes names – encapsulated central truths about each cultural group that met in the Upper Midwest. Each community maintained a specific sense of what marriage meant, how it should be celebrated, and what responsibilities were inherent in its practice: marriage provided a blueprint for social cohesion. For both the Christian missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the Dakota and Ojibwe communities that they sought to convert, marriage was a spiritual matter, a labor agreement, an indicator of social status, and – hopefully – a means to assure companionship. Yet these similarities were not always visible to each group. The Dakota people who came and went from the camping grounds at Lac qui Parle expressed no opinion of Christian marriage of which the missionaries themselves were aware. The missionaries, however, found much to condemn in Dakota marriage, from ceremonies to polygamy to the division of labor between men and women. Neither group changed the other, however – the Dakota because they did not care to, and the missionaries because they had no power to effect the alterations they so desperately desired.

The ability of each of the communities Mary observed to marry as they pleased tells us much about the power of the encroaching American state. The Dakota among whom Mary lived wanted no part of the Americans’ marital practices and through mid-century had the power to resist attempts to make them adopt the same. The American missionaries judged Dakota practices, but could do little more than lament what they saw – this was not yet an American place. Yet changes were occurring in the marital fabric of the region. Whereas marriages according to the "custom of the country" had long flourished in the Upper Midwest, fur traders began in the 1830s to solemnize their unions according to American practice. With more Euro-Americans arriving in the Upper Midwest, trader marriages began to turn toward the structures of that community, hinting at the cultural and political changes the region was soon to face.

Mary Longley was a 22 year old schoolteacher in Bethlehem, Indiana when she first met Stephen Riggs. In February of 1836, she received a letter from Rev. Dyer Burgess, the clergyman who had acted as her “protector” on her journey from Massachusetts to Indiana in 1835, introducing “a friend of his, a man of promising talents now a member of the Western Theological Seminary preparing for a mission to China.” The friend, wrote Mary to her mother, had asked Burgess, “to ascertain whether I was under any particular engagement and provided I was not . . . [he] would visit Indiana in April.” Mary regarded the proposition as a serious matter, less because of the prospect of marriage itself than because of the work her marriage might sustain. “I shall decide nothing regarding the individual alluded to at present,” she wrote her brother Alfred, "but I ought soon to decide regarding my own duty – my fitness for a missionary.”[2]

Stephen Riggs’ visit to Bethlehem in April deepened Mary's contemplation of the spiritual duty inherent in the marriage he proposed. “You know I despise the affectation of romance and desire to bring my views down to sober reality,” she wrote to Alfred after Riggs’ departure. Yet even in a marriage premised upon service to God, Mary felt sure there should be amiability between partners, and on this point she had qualms. “I think him, viz. Mr. Riggs, intelligent, well informed and deeply interested in the cause of missions,” she wrote, “but as yet I do not feel that regard which I am sure I ought to feel for a lone fellow pilgrim.” She described Riggs “as one smaller than middle stature, plainer than the mediocrity, even very homely if you please & appearing to better advantage in conversation than in the desk [pulpit].” She tried to consider what extenuating circumstances might have affected the manner of their meeting. “Though Mr. R. seemed familiar yet there was not that frankness, that open heartedness, which I had hoped for. It might have been occasioned by my own demeanor, for notwithstanding all resolutions I had formed of forgetting my old aversion to introductions, & thinking only of the great & blessed work in contemplation, it would occasionally force itself upon me,” she wrote. Riggs had promised to write letters, and Mary hoped they would be “frank and explicit.” In the interim she planned to “commune with my own heart, listen to the ‘still and small voice’ & obey its dictates.” Personal compatibility was of less importance to Mary than discerning the will of God.[3]

Riggs shared Mary's faith that God would reveal the proper course of action regarding their potential marriage. “I know if I trust God I cannot be disappointed in a companion,” he wrote to Mary in May. Riggs believed that God would make him a good husband, and that as a husband he would do God’s work. “I would entirely trust His goodness to provide me with such a [wife],” he wrote, “& enable me also to be such a one as will promote happiness & advance His cause.” Like Mary, Riggs' decision-making was practical rather than sentimental. “I know you love the poor,” he wrote. “I should think from your conversation that you would have very little difficulty in deciding that it is your duty to become a missionary – but this will scarce touch the question whether you are willing to go with me.” Mary forwarded the letter to her mother noting that “I shall content myself if he has good common sense, is kind & a devoted Christian.” By June Mary had accepted Riggs’ proposal.[4]

The Riggses’ were married in Massachusetts in February, 1837. Although the exact liturgy used at their wedding is uncertain, the conventions of Protestant wedding ceremonies were remarkably similar across denominational lines.[5] The ceremony identified God as the means by which two individuals became one – the joiner or “knytt[er]” of souls.[6] His will superseded that of any other, making the marriage a lifelong connection that no human being could end. The ceremony also formally recognized the separation of children from parents, whether by the "giving" of the bride by her father or the Biblical exhortation for a man to leave his parents and take a wife. One family life came to an abrupt end upon marriage, but another began: the ceremony reminded a couple that marriage was in part ordained so that children could be raised in the sight of God.[7] The theme of separation was inherent in a Christian, Euro-American marriage ceremony: separation from individualism, from a person's family of birth, and from worldly temptations. This theme of separation was particularly significant for Stephen and Mary, poised to begin a journey into the Upper Midwest.

Yet religious rites, music, and a gathering of friends and family did not make a marriage legal. Massachusetts required that before a wedding could take place, prospective couples must publish their intent to marry on three separate occasions at a church or the offices of the town clerk. The wedding must be presided over by a designated representative of the state of Massachusetts – it was as such a figure, rather than as a man of God, that the clergyman who married Mary and Stephen gave legal weight to the proceedings. Finally, the marriage had to be recorded by the minister and that record turned over to the town clerk: failure to do this would have the minister stripped of his ability to marry others. When these requirements were met, couples

[1]Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux. (1880; reprint, Williamstown, Mass.: Corner House Publishers, 1971), 25, 33, 44; Maida Leonard Riggs ed., A Small Bit of Bread and Butter: Letters from the Dakota Territory 1832-1869. (South Deerfield, Mass.: Ash Grove Press, 1996), 39, 53, 62.

[2]Mary Ann Longley to Alfred Longley, February 2, 1836 in Riggs, A Small Bit of Bread and Butter, 13.

[3]Mary Ann Longley to Alfred Longley, April 26, 1836, ibid., 12-13.

[4]Stephen Riggs to Mary Ann Longley, quoted in Mary Ann Longley to Martha Taylor Longley, May 17, 1836.,ibid., 13-14.

[5]See the discussion of protestant liturgies since 1564 in Mark Seale and Kenneth W. Stevenson ed. Documents of the Marriage Liturgy. (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 215-238.

[6]See the wedding liturgies from The Prayer Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1558 and The Liturgy of John Knox Received by the Church of Scotland in 1564, in Seale and Stevenson ed., 220, 229.

[7]Ibid., 215-238.