The essay I chose to write about was “Marriage in Slavery” written by Brenda Stevenson, in Chapter 5. In the essay, Stevenson talks about the hardships that Blacks had to face as partners and parents in Virginia during the antebellum era. They believed that a positive family life was necessary to both individual and group survival. For many, its existence served as an assurance of comfort in a world that was proven to be cold and uncertain. Yet for most pre-Civil War Blacks, it seemed almost impossible to obtain the physical and emotional idea of a family. White Virginians felt the need to try to control every aspect of the slave life, including the family in order to control the labor of their slaves. It was not unusual for slave masters