Frequency and levels of domestic violence in America prior to the Civil War are very hard to determine. Laws and ordinances varied from colony to colony and state to state, and common-law tradition affected notions of what constituted acceptable "discipline" or means to maintain order within families and the extended household. These common-law traditions in most instances determined whether a case of violence in a domestic situation would result in a complaint and, if a complaint was made, colored court decisions.
In early America the lack of established government and legal systems except for tenuous knowledge of common law left absolute control of the household in the hands of patriarchs. Control of the domestic sphere by the father or the senior adult male in the household was universally accepted. Patriarchal authority included the control of wives, daughters, unmarried sisters, children, servants, slaves, and any other dependent males who happened to be associated with the extended household. Wives and mothers also had their realm of authority, over servants, slaves, and children. Dependent free men and women (and sometimes children) had authority over servants and slaves through delegatus non potest delegare, through the father or patriarch.
Violent action against dependents was sanctioned to the greatest degree within the extended household. This situation persisted from the 1750s through the 1850s, until local governments and laws were established to create order and to enforce it. The majority of households in early America contained neither servant nor slave; thus the most frequent instances of domestic violence were between husbands and wives, parents and children, and among children.
Throughout the colonial period and into the early nineteenth century, the use of both physical restraint and violence, short of murder and mayhem, were commonly allowed by law and upheld by society and the courts in their uses by authority figures over dependents. Within the immediate family, the English common-law "rule of thumb" allowed "necessary" physical correction of wives by husbands and children by parents. Such correction could be applied with impunity by means of a stick, rod, or switch no broader than a man's thumb to punish or maintain control.
Stronger measures could be taken to control or discipline servants or slaves. Although indentured servants, and later non-contracted domestic servants, had redress under the law in cases where excessive force or extreme physical abuse could be proven, they still were subject to potentially greater levels of violence by masters seeking to maintain control over them. Domestic servants in the nineteenth century could give notice and leave if the controls and punishments were more than they could bear. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indentured servants, who were contracted to work for from three to seven years, could be legally beaten and whipped by their masters for various infractions, including insubordination and laziness. An overwhelming majority of indentured servants who sued their masters for unreasonable levels of abuse did receive favorable judgments in court, from reduced terms of service to immediate freedom. But justices of the peace would not recommend legal action unless they found evidence of a pattern of continuous violent punishments.
Slaves faced the highest levels of violence sanctioned by law. By the turn of the eighteenth century, laws in all colonies had identified slaves as chattel property subject entirely to their masters' "good will." An owner could treat his own property in any manner he chose. Thus slaves could be summarily beaten, tortured, maimed, or killed "at will" by their masters. Only the temperance advised either by the church or through social pressures stayed the hand of more severe masters. As far as the law and the court system were concerned, the only caution against extreme violence to slaves was that masters be aware of the public consequences of their actions—in other words, how extreme violence against their own slaves might affect the attitudes of other slaves. This became more of a concern when news of slave insurrections or planned rebellions spread through the colonies. After Stono, South Carolina began to limit punishments, and in the period after the Revolution almost all states criminalized the murder of a slave, even by a master. In addition, in the wake of the Revolution the states prohibited branding, castration, hamstringing, and other forms of excessive cruelty inflicted on slaves.
Attitudes toward domestic violence stemmed in part from America's origins in Puritan New England. New England Puritans viewed children as inherently evil and believed that children's will had to be broken in order for them to accept God. The "breaking" of children involved strict rules and regulations which, if disobeyed, brought routine corporal punishment. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was an understatement, since Puritan parents, including mothers, believed that their children's very souls were at stake if they were not held to a strict line. Puritan husbands were expected to keep their wives in line through corporal punishment when deemed necessary.
Elsewhere, as in seventeenth-century Virginia, the rarity of women prompted men to develop a more protective attitude toward them. As the number of women in the colony increased, however, instances of violence against wives increased. Courts typically sought proof that the violence was beyond acceptable levels of correction.
Pennsylvanians, both citizens and government leaders, exhibited a greater desire for spousal harmony and domestic tranquility. However, in the eighteenth century Pennsylvania's murder rate per capita was twice as high as London's and the frequency of assaults was higher than in most other colonies. Nearly as many murders and assaults occurred within the household as did in the public sphere. Despite Quaker influence and appeals for peaceful action, most colonists in Pennsylvania, as in the other colonies, saw corporal punishment of dependents as a routine matter. The vast majority of violent punishments were not reported. In more severe cases that came to light, beatings, rapes, and murders of women (nearly two-thirds of the cases were attacks by husbands and fathers against female dependents) were still judged by their potential acceptability as legitimate correction, or seen as beyond the purview of the courts. Close to one-third of domestic assault complaints in colonial Pennsylvania were either dismissed by magistrates or grand juries or dropped by attorneys as not contestable. Over half of the assailants in domestic cases brought to trial in Pennsylvania were found not guilty of exceeding a normal standard of correction. In the face of accepted standards of behavior, both biblical and legal, by household heads, as well as the fear of an embarrassing public display that would not in any event end or limit abuse, few victims chose to announce domestic violence.
Over time domestic violence came to be defined with greater uniformity across the United States. Likewise, limits began to be placed on the amount of control a household head could exercise over his dependents. Both society in general and local and state governments began to exert more influence and impose more strictures on physical punishments meted out in the home. In many ways, slavery itself became the last bastion of absolute domestic controls.