Renfrow v. Renfrow
| Decision Date | 11 March 1899 |
| Docket Number | 11100 |
| Citation | 56 P. 534,60 Kan. 277 |
| Parties | JACOB RENFROW et al. v. ANN RENFROW |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
Decided January, 1899.
Error from Douglas district court; JOHN T. BURRIS, judge pro tem. Opinion filed March 11, 1899. Affirmed.
Judgment affirmed.
W. W Nevison, for plaintiffs in error.
A. C Harding, and A. F. Martin, for defendant in error.
Grant and Ann Renfrow were colored persons living in the state of Missouri. They married each other in 1852 according to the ordinary form of marriage agreement and ceremony. This marriage did not confer upon them any legalized matrimonial status or relation. It was not deemed illegal or immoral by the law then obtaining, but it did not constitute them husband and wife. "It was an inflexible rule of the law of African slavery wherever it existed that the slave was incapable of entering into any contract, not excepting the contract of marriage." (Hall v. United States, etc., 92 U.S. 27, 23 L.Ed. 597.) (Howard v. Howard, 6 Jones Law 235.) To the same effect is Johnson v. Johnson, 45 Mo. 595. As presently more particularly stated, the persons named lived together as husband and wife until 1868. Missouri was not within the insurrectionary portions of slaveholding territory over which the emancipation proclamations of September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, operated. Slavery continued to exist there until abolished, January 11, 1865, by ordinance of the constitutional convention of that state. (Gen. Stat. of Missouri, 1889, p. 63.) After the passage of this ordinance, and on February 20, 1865, the legislature of Missouri enacted the following statute:
The Renfrows never complied with the provisions of this law. In disregard of it they continued to live together until 1868, in which year Grant abandoned Ann, declaring his intention no longer to recognize her as his wife. Thenceforth he never did recognize her as such, but several times thereafter married other women, by some of whom he had children. Throughout the time intervening between his emancipation from slavery and his separation from Ann they lived together in Missouri as husband and wife, mutually recognizing and holding each other out in the face of the world as such. Grant Renfrow moved to Kansas, accumulated here a small amount of property, and died. This action was instituted by his first wife, Ann, in assertion of her rights as his widow to a division of the property left by him. To this action his children and his last wife, Medora, were made defendants. Upon the facts above summarized judgment was rendered against them, and they prosecute error to this court.
It is admitted by counsel for plaintiffs in error that consensual or common-law marriages are and at the dates above mentioned were recognized as valid in the state of Missouri. It is however, insisted that the above-quoted Missouri statute disqualified persons of color from contracting marriage according to the common law. It is insisted that the penal provisions of this statute excluded such class of persons from the operation of the common law of consensual marriage, and rendered ineffectual and void all agreements of marriage by such persons which were not solemnized according to...
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