Even though women’s centuries-old legal confines of coverture were both maintained and reaffirmed throughout much of the nineteenth-century, this work uncovers an explanation behind the daily appearance of women in late antebellum Baltimore courtrooms who were surprisingly able to break their ancient legal chains by successfully prosecuting and imprisoning countless men – including husbands – on charges of assault and battery. In order to rationalize this glaring legal and social contradiction, this work combines both old and new historical trends in order to reveal how – when combined with the post-Revolutionary concerns over republicanism, masculinity, moral reform, race, and class – the law tended to bend in the favor of traditionally disempowered, ethnic, and working-class women who suffered from abuse. Reform-minded leaders of Baltimore, in particular, were so concerned with ridding the city of its “Mobtown” moniker that, in order to gain access to violence-prone men, local Justices of the Peace often fostered a localized or preliminary legal environment in which women could prosecute cases of intimate violence.

By relying on Baltimore newspapers, jail records, legal handbooks, and reform literature, this study provides insight into antebellum trends along a more middle-ground perspective. As a blossoming republican city, Baltimore represents a perfect nexus of nineteenth-century urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, as well as regional loyalties. Yet, most importantly, this study uncovers how, after centuries of lawfully sanctioned abuse against women, the antebellum period represents an increasing deviation from that trend and the beginning of a wide-scale community and legal condemnation of intimate violence.