Divorce

On 17 February 1827 the Senate passed an act, already approved by the House of Delegates, that transferred a portion of the responsibility for ruling on divorce petitions from the General Assembly to the Superior Courts of Chancery. Before this legislation, the General Assembly reviewed and decided all divorce suits in the commonwealth. However, complaints arose from lawmakers in 1824, when their time was monopolized by sixteen petitions. After debating the amount of power that they were willing to defer to the courts, legislators passed Virginia's first general law concerning divorce.

Until 1827, and for many years thereafter, Virginians encountered sizable obstacles to ending a marriage. Hostility to divorce had its roots in the Anglican prohibition, which persisted after the Revolution, and divorce remained an anomaly in the Old Dominion. Members of the General Assembly tried to maintain this strict control over the dissolution of marriages. Between 1786, the year of the first divorce petition, and 1827, the year of the first divorce act, the legislature approved only 42 divorces out of a total of 268 petitions. It was able to keep divorce numbers low by applying harsh restrictions on the grounds couples could cite to end their unions. The 1827 act gave courts the right to provide absolute divorces when individuals proved "natural or incurable impotency of body at the time of entering into the matrimonial contract; idiocy, bigamy." However, they could only grant legal separations, denying either party the right to remarry, in cases of "adultery, cruelty, and just cause of bodily fear." People often submitted petitions multiple times before being granted a divorce, if they received one at all.

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, people began entering into marriage more for love than for convenience. Therefore, the notion that remaining in an unhappy union was a societal duty garnered less support. Individuals introduced more divorce requests to the legislature and courts, as restrictions gradually loosened. With the passage of the 1851 Virginia Constitution, legislative divorces became a thing of the past, with the courts gaining all jurisdiction over petitions.