Declared Unfit for Marriage: How an 1856 Virginia Inheritance Crisis Forced One of the Most Unthinkable Legal Decisions of the Slave Era

In Virginia, 1856, law—not love—decided who could marry, who could inherit property, and who could be recognized as fully human.

For Elellanar Whitmore, a white woman from a powerful plantation family, the law delivered a quiet but devastating verdict: unmarriageable.

She was twenty-two years old, highly educated, intellectually formidable, and the sole surviving child of Colonel Richard Whitmore, owner of more than five thousand acres of land and over two hundred enslaved people. Yet to Southern society, none of that mattered.

Elellanar used a wheelchair.

In mid-19th-century America, disability was not treated as a medical condition—it was treated as a social defect. Women who could not physically conform to domestic expectations were presumed unfit for marriage, motherhood, and inheritance. Doctors speculated freely, reputations collapsed overnight, and rumors carried legal consequences.

By 1856, twelve arranged courtships had ended the same way.

Rejection.

Not because of character.
Not because of intelligence.
But because disability threatened lineage, labor, and legacy.

When Property Law Overrides Family

Colonel Whitmore faced a legal problem with no humane solution under Virginia statute.

If he died:

·       His daughter could not independently inherit the estate

·       Guardianship would transfer to a male cousin

·       Elellanar would be legally dependent, vulnerable, and displaced

Marriage was the only accepted protection.

But no white man would accept a disabled wife—regardless of dowry.

The situation forced Whitmore into a decision that violated every social rule of the slaveholding South.

He turned not to another planter—but to Josiah, the plantation’s blacksmith.

Josiah: The Man the Records Misnamed

Josiah appears in plantation ledgers as:

·       Male

·       Enslaved

·       Laborer

·       Approximate age unknown

What the records do not show:

·       He was literate—illegally

·       He read Shakespeare in secret

·       He possessed advanced mechanical intelligence

·       He was physically imposing and socially feared

At over seven feet tall, Josiah was labeled “the brute”—a racial stereotype that reduced strength to savagery.

But those who observed him closely described restraint, discipline, and unusual gentleness.

Whitmore’s reasoning was chilling—but legally sound by Southern standards.

Josiah could not abandon Elellanar.
He could not legally leave the estate.
He could be ordered—yet trusted—to protect her.

The arrangement was framed not as marriage, but custodial guardianship enforced by slavery law.

An Arrangement the Law Never Anticipated

What followed unsettled everyone involved.

Elellanar and Josiah were forced into proximity not by affection, but by survival. Over time, the boundaries imposed by race, disability, and enslavement began to fracture under something the law had no language for: mutual recognition.

Their relationship developed in silence, intellectual companionship, and shared labor—not public defiance.

This was not romance as myth.
It was intimacy born from exclusion.

When Colonel Whitmore eventually discovered the truth, he confronted a reality his own legal system had created.

Punishing Josiah meant condemning his daughter.
Separating them meant legal abandonment.
Ignoring it meant scandal.

Selling Josiah—common practice—would have erased him permanently.

The Decision That Cost a Planter Everything

In early 1857, Whitmore made an unprecedented choice.

He:

·       Legally emancipated Josiah

·       Secured freedom papers valid in Northern states

·       Provided capital for relocation

·       Arranged a lawful marriage outside Virginia jurisdiction

This act effectively destroyed Whitmore’s standing among Southern elites.

Freeing an enslaved man—especially one married to his daughter—was considered ideological treason.

Elellanar and Josiah left Virginia quietly, traveling north with documents that represented everything the South denied them.

Life Beyond the Law That Tried to Erase Them

In Philadelphia, they entered a world still hostile—but legally possible.

Josiah opened a blacksmith business documented in city records.
Elellanar managed finances, correspondence, and contracts.
They raised five children whose birth certificates survive.
Orthopedic devices Josiah designed for Elellanar are referenced in private letters.

This was not a fairy tale.
It was reconstruction through defiance.

They lived openly as husband and wife for thirty-eight years.

Both died in March 1895—one day apart.

They are buried together.

Why This Story Still Matters

This case is now studied under:

·       Disability history

·       Slavery and emancipation law

·       Interracial marriage jurisprudence

·       Women’s property rights

It exposes how:

·       Law can manufacture cruelty without malice

·       Disability can erase legal personhood

·       Enslavement weaponized proximity

·       Freedom sometimes required breaking every rule at once

Elellanar Whitmore was not “unmarriageable.”
Josiah was not a “brute.”

Those labels belonged to a system terrified of intelligence without obedience and humanity without permission.

History tried to compress them into footnotes.

Instead, their documents remain.

And so does the evidence that even in the most rigid legal regimes, love—and choice—found a way the law never predicted.