Burlage v. Burlage
| Decision Date | 28 April 1887 |
| Citation | 65 Mich. 624,32 N.W. 866 |
| Court | Michigan Supreme Court |
| Parties | BURLAGE v. BURLAGE. |
Appeal from circuit court, Wayne county. In chancery.
W.L Carpenter, for complainant.
William Look, (Edgar Weeks, of counsel,) for defendant and appellant.
Complainant having filed a bill for divorce on the ground of cruelty, was awarded a separation from bed and board for two years only with an allowance annually during that period and no longer. Defendant appeals from that decree.
Under our statutes no such decree can be made except upon testimony which would warrant an absolute divorce. We are bound to suppose the Wayne circuit court was satisfied such a case had been made out. If so, we can only account for the decree, which is not much, if any, more stringent than an order putting defendant on his good behavior for two years on the idea that it was supposed defendant, after such a reminder, would mend his ways, and treat his wife decently.
The parties are both in early life; the wife being not far from her majority, and defendant some six or seven years older. She is the daughter of a market gardener in the outskirts of Detroit, and he is himself a market gardener, who, when he married, lived in the same house with his mother, who owned a part of the land he worked. Complainant found her living in the house, where she continued to live for some time. Some of the family troubles grew out of this relation. The acts charged included some instances of personal violence, and some of brutality not consisting in assaults, but in abuse and intimidation of the most insulting character. Some acts were not done in view of third persons, but were under circumstances not entirely concealed. The witnesses (except the parties) were examined apart from each other, and complainant was in the main corroborated, so far as the facts were within the knowledge of others. The defendant denied nearly every essential fact, and undertook to give an innocent and sometimes playful meaning to others. But his testimony is full of inconsistencies, and practically confirms complainant's case in its worst features. As it was pointed out in Briggs v. Briggs, 20 Mich. 34, the evidence of conduct, the effects of which indicate persistent cruelty, is better corroborated by those effects than by the recitals of witnesses.
It is not disputed that, if complainant and her witnesses tell the truth, the case is a very aggravated one. It would do no good to go at large into the unpleasant details, but one or two samples indicate the difference in swearing. The earliest serious violence sworn to was quite soon after marriage, when complainant and others were gathering berries. She appears, in what was evidently a young wife's playfulness, to have reached over from her row to his, and picked some of his best berries. He either pushed her over playfully, as he says, or struck her angrily, and threw her down by the blow, as she says. It is shown very plainly that he went off in a fit of sullen anger, and did not come to the house till evening; that he then displayed such ugliness as terrified complainant, who the next morning took refuge with her own mother, and remained away several...
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