Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina

Introduction

Introduction R eflecting on transformations in North Carolina society since the Civil War, Rev. Frank L. Reid, pastor of Raleigh’s Edenton Street Methodist Church and editor of the Christian Advocate, observed in 1887, “There is a spirit of unrest, disquietude and discontent, which seems to foreshadow some great change. Public feeling is about to cut loose from its old fastenings. . . . Ties that have bound men together heretofore are weakening. . . .The foundations of our social fabric are being shaken.”1 Born in 1851, Reid had seen firsthand how the Civil War had transformed North Carolina’s political, economic, and social order. Yet the most significant changes he had witnessed were intangible. An 1881 editorial in the Raleigh Farmer and Mechanic expressed a similar opinion: “We are tempted to add some regrets which occur to us whenever called upon to chronicle the decrease of any of our old citizens. These be the links, whose gradual dropping away, one by one, lessen the ties between the Old South and the New; the Old Time South, with her Hospitality, Chivalry, Integrity, and High Personal Honor; the New South with her Money Getting, Wire Working, Energetic, Scheming, Go-a-head, Free-and-Easy Social and Personal ‘ideas’!”2 At the root of both sentiments was a deep unease about how the Civil War had transformed the moral framework through which North Carolinians interpreted their world. Generations of historians have explored the myriad ways in which the Civil War left a lasting imprint on the South. They have outlined in great detail how Confederate defeat and emancipation transformed the region’s political, economic, and social landscape.3 Yet, as the quotations above indicate , many North Carolinians understood that behind or beneath these visible changes, there had also been a significant shift in moral sentiments. Introduction 2 This study explores a few of these changing moral sentiments in Civil War era North Carolina. Specifically, it examines black and white North Carolinians ’ mutable views of suicide, divorce, and debt. As social constructs, suicide, divorce, and debt functioned as barometers of change reflecting the relationship between the individual and society. This work argues that the Civil War forced North Carolinians to reevaluate the meaning of suicide, divorce, and debt and that the nature of this reinterpretation was predicated on race.The Civil War transformed how both white and black North Carolinians understood their place in society and the claims that society had upon them. For whites, this transformation entailed a shift from a world in which individuals were tightly bound to their local community to one in which they were increasingly untethered from social ties. For black North Carolinians, however, these trends headed in the opposite direction, as emancipation laid the groundwork for new bonds of community. Albert Camus observed in The Myth of Sisyphus that suicide presents the “one truly serious philosophical problem”: whether life in a given social context is worth living.4 Committing suicide,Camus argued, answered that question in the negative, rejecting social ties in favor of an unknown fate. Divorce and debt, in their own ways, ask similar questions about the value of social relationships.When someone commits suicide, he or she is making a claim about the capacity for a particular individual to live in his or her society. When someone files for divorce, he or she is making a claim about marriage and the social and cultural institutions that sanctioned it. When someone participates in credit relationships, he or she is also making claims about the nature of social obligations. In turn, the ways in which others respond to another’s decision to commit suicide, file for divorce, or declare bankruptcy reflect not only their own attitudes toward these practices but also what such actions say about social order, community values, and deviancy . These moral barometers did not exist in isolation but developed in a complex interplay with individual behavior. Individuals evaluate the merits of a particular course of action based in part on prevailing cultural attitudes . Their decision either to conform to or deviate from cultural norms can itself exert some small force on the cultural attitude, strengthening or weakening it. Usually, ideas and actions reinforce each other in a period of stasis. At other times, however, small changes in behavior or attitudes can institute an autocatalytic process that can quickly transform old moral Introduction 3 sentiments and create new ones.5 To draw a biological metaphor, the...