[996] See Table III, Nos. 2, 8, 15, 24, 25, 26, 74, 85.
[997] MSS. Early Court Files of Suffolk, DCCXCIII, No. .29730: see Table II, Nos. 5 and 6.
[998] In Table III, Nos. 11 and 19, after previous written agreement, separation from bed and board with alimony is allowed. The same is true of No. 65, except that the wife retained her right of dower. Nos. 55, 56, and 57 are cases of verbal agreement; but this does not constitute the sole reason for the decree.
[999] Table III, No. 4; cf. Table III, No. 7, and Table II, No. 8.
[1000] In 1745 a slave was allowed a divorce for his wife's adultery with a white man: see Gray's note to Oliver v. Sale in Quincy, Reports, 29; and Bishop, Mar., Div., and Sep., I, 282.
[1001] Acts and Laws of ... New Hamp., 1696-1726 (Boston, 1726), 10; ibid. (Portsmouth, 1761), 54; ibid. (Portsmouth, 1771), 11.
[1002] The petition is in the "Province Records and Court Papers": Coll. New Hamp. Hist. Soc., VIII, 68.
[1003] Woolsey, Divorce, 196, says, "At first, divorces were mainly, if not quite exclusively, granted by an act of a colonial legislature, in accordance, perhaps, with the practice then, and until recently, existing in England, for the House of Peers to take cases of dissolution of marriage into their own hands." This statement is of course too broad; but Cowley is decidedly in error when he declares that the "remark of President Woolsey requires modification with respect to Rhode Island, and still more with respect to Connecticut. Neither Massachusetts nor New York nor any other Colony or State knew anything of legislative divorce until a much later day."—Our Divorce Courts, 22.
[1004] So stated by Goodwin, Pilgrim Republic, 596, 597, who gives a list of the cases, to which, after independent examination of the Plymouth Records, I am unable to add any new examples.
[1005] Ply. Col. Rec., IV, 66 (1664), 187, 192 (1668), 42, 46, 47 (earlier notices). Cf. Goodwin, op. cit., 596.