The Hearts of Nineteenth-Century Men: Bigamy and Working-Class Marriage in New York City, 1800–1890

In 19th-century america, the bigamous marriage became a controversial subject and repeated cultural metaphor. From popular fiction to sensationalistic journalism to purity reform literature, writers repeatedly employed bigamy as a moral signpost warning readers of the sexual dangers and illicit deceptions of urban life. Middle-class Americans in particular envisioned the male bigamist as a particular type of confidence man. Like gamblers and “sporting men,” these figures prowled the parlors of respectable households in search of hapless, innocent women whom they looked to conquer and seduce, dupe and destroy. Such status-conscious social climbers deceptively passed for something they were not. Most authors depicted the practice in Manichaean terms of good versus evil, innocence versus corruption. Bigamy thus enabled writers to contrast the nostalgic, virtuous, agrarian republicanism of postrevolutionary America with the perceived urban depravity of the coarse, new metropolis. Such illegal matrimony, editorialized one newspaper, “speaks volumes for man's duplicity and woman's weakness.” Pure and simple, bigamy was “mere wickedness.”