Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North CarolinaDuring 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. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat 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. Silkenat 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 innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war. |
Contents
| 1 | |
BY HIS OWN HAND Suicide | 7 |
TO LOOSEN THE BANDS OF SOCITEY Divorce | 71 |
ENSLAVED BY DEBT The Culture of Credit and Debt | 137 |
Conclusion | 217 |
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Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina David Silkenat No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
African Americans antebellum Antebellum South antebellum white Archibald Murphey argued bankruptcy Baptist black North Carolinians boardinghouse Chapel Hill Charlotte Observer Cheshire Church Civil claimed Confederate Convention County Divorce Records court creditors cultural death debt debtors diary divorce divorce petitions economic emancipation Eugene Grissom free blacks Freedom gift economy Graves’s Grissom History husband Ibid indicates James Webb John Jonathan Worth Journal Julia Graves Julia Wolfe Labor legislature lives Louisiana State University marriage marriage and divorce married moral NCDAH Negro nineteenth century North Caro North Carolina North Carolina Insane North Carolina Press Observer Orange County Papers Patterson’s pawnshop People’s Press plantation planters political Populist postbellum PTSD Raleigh Raleigh Register Reconstruction relationships Report significant slave slave marriages slave owners Slavery social society Southern state’s stay law suicidal patients tion University of North University Press veterans vorce Webb’s white North Carolinians wife Wilmington women wrote York