APPEAL from the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia; the case being this:
By a statute in force in Indiana in 1857 it was thus enacted:
'Divorces may be decreed by the Circuit Court of the State on petition, filed by any person at the time a bon a fide resident of the county in which the same is filed; of which bon a fide residence the affidavit of such petition shall be prim a facie evidence.
'The grounds of divorce are (among others):
'Abandonment for one year.
'Cruel treatment of either party by the other.'
The statute further declares that, the court, in decreeing a divorce, shall make provision for the guardianship, custody, support, and education of the minor children of such marriage.
With this statute in force, one Mrs. Annie Jane Cheever, in June, 1857, she being then in Marion County, Indiana, filed a bill in the County Court of the State (the proper court, if the case were otherwise one for its cognizance), praying a divorce, a vinculo, from her husband, B. H. Cheever. Mrs. Cheever had come to Indiana from Washington in apparently the February preceding, and the city just named was the place where her parents had long lived, where it seemed that she was brought up, and where in 1842 she was married; a contemporary document describing both herself and her then intended husband, as 'of the city of Washington.' At the time of the application for divorce, Mrs. Cheever was owner, as for more than seventeen years previously she had been, by devise from her father, of real estate in Washington; a store on Pennsylvania Avenue and two houses on Sixth Street; property which on her marriage in 1842 had been settled in trust, that she should 'receive, take, and enjoy the rents and profits to her sole and exclusive use and benefit.'
There was little in the record to show exactly what motive took Mrs. Cheever from Washington to Indiana; or how long exactly she remained in Indiana, or how or where, by dates, she was living after she left it. But it was certain that divorces a vinculo could not, when she went to Indiana, nor until long after she was divorced in that State, be obtained by law in the District of Columbia.
Her petition for divorce-which described her as a resident of Marion County, and, to which was annexed an affidavit that she was a bon a fide resident of the county at the time the petition was filed (June 16th, 1857), and was so still-represented that she had been married to Cheever; that after conduct to her, harsh, cruel, and severe, he had in 1854 abandoned her without any purpose of returning to her; and it gave the names and dates of birth of four children, which it stated were the issue of the marriage.
The husband, by an answer of three lines, denied the allegations of the wife's bill, and required strict proof; and on his part filed a cross-bill, setting forth the fact of her separate property, the existence of the children, that in 1854 a disagreement arose between him and his wife which was wholly irreconcilable, that he had abandoned her with intent never to live with her again; that reconciliation was impossible: and he, too, on his part concluded his petition with a prayer for a divorce a vinculo, and to have custody of the older children, and the profits of the real estate to support them.
To this cross-bill of her husband Mrs. Cheever appeared without process, and the cause being called for trial, it was by consent of parties submitted to the court without a jury, and 'the court having heard the evidence,' as the record stated, found the marriage, abandonment, and residence of Mrs. Cheever, the birth and names of the children all as alleged, and on the 26th of August, 1857, decreed the divorce prayed for by both parties alike.
How long Mrs. Cheever remained in Indiana after this date was not quite apparent. It rather seemed as if she had left it in the end of the following September. The record of the already described proceeding in divorce, contained under the date of February 24th, 1858, this entry:
'Now comes S. Yandes, Esq., attorney for B. H. Cheever, and L. Barton, Esq., attorney for Annie Jane Cheever, and on their motion each of said parties has leave to withdraw their respective depositions filed in this court at the last term thereof, in the cause then pending for divorce between said Cheever and Cheever.'
Some time before December of the same year (in June, as was said in one of the briefs, without contradiction by the other), Mrs. Cheever remarried, and went to Kentucky. Her second husband dying, she came back, apparently, to Washington. She was there it seemed in 1862 and 1863.