Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina
Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina
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Abstract
During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. This book explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context, in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. The author argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America; and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.
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Front Matter
- Introduction
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Part I By His Own Hand Suicide
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Part II To Loosen the Bands of Society Divorce
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Part III Enslaved by Debt: The Culture of Credit & Debt
- Seven Sacredness of Obligations: Debt in Antebellum North Carolina
- Eight Out of Debt before I Die: The Credit Crisis of the Civil War
- Nine What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It General Stores, Pawnshops, & Boardinghouses in the New South
- Ten Nothing Less than a Question of Slavery or Freedom Populism & the Crisis of Debt in the New South
- Conclusion
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End Matter
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