The celebrated case of Myra Clark Gaines: a narrative of marriage, legitimacy, and inheritance in nineteenth-century America

Abstract

Between 1834 and 1891 the Great Gaines Case wound a torturous path through the United States legal system. In 1861 Justice James Wayne of the United States Supreme Court termed it the "most remarkable in the history of the court." The narrative of Myra Gaines' attempt to prove her right to her father's enormous fortune includes such staples of melodrama as a secret marriage, a bigamous husband, a false will, an unscrupulous trustee, and an injured orphan. The Great Gaines Case occupied a point of transition in the nineteenth century where judicial concerns for women's welfare intersected with the emergence of one woman from her sheltered sphere. By bringing her case to the courtroom and keeping it there, Myra Gaines supplied the issues that allowed the nineteenth-century judiciary to construct a new type of family law that provided special protection for women, children, and marriages. As it wove together the strands of this emerging domestic relations law and the popularity of sentimental fiction, the Gaines Case created a "true-life romance" that remained on the front pages of newspapers all over the country for over fifty years.