Wife-sale was never acknowledged officially but seems to have been an ingenious (if sexist) answer to a bad marriage among the less respectable parts of society in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries England and America. Divorce at the time was out of reach for all those who could not afford great expense but were willing to see their reputations ruined in a lengthy court trial.
The frontier in American history, in fact and in fiction, was everywhere the site of excesses, violence, and license. Cumberland County from its first settlements through the post revolutionary years was no exception.