Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, & Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (review)

Silkenat’s Moments of Despair is a genuinely interesting book about three depressing topics—suicide, divorce, and debt. With a focus on North Carolina in the Civil War period (broadly construed to include both the prewar and postwar periods), he explores, via mostly anecdotal historical evidence, how the Civil War and the changes that it brought helped to reshape the attitudes of North Carolinians—black and white—about suicide, divorce, and debt.

After a brief introduction, Silkenat divides Moments of Despair into three parts, dealing respectively with each of his dreary yet fascinating subjects. He starts with suicide, asserting that white North Carolinians condemned self-destruction in the antebellum period but that African Americans, still mostly enmeshed in slavery’s misery, proved more sympathetic to people in their community who killed themselves. Following the Civil War, as whites coped with defeat and blacks in North Carolina enjoyed their new freedom, attitudes on suicide reversed for both races: “While white North Carolinians became more tolerant of suicide after the Civil War, the state’s African American population demonstrated the opposite propensity” (10).

Likewise, the Civil War led to a significant shift, according to Silkenat, in how people in North Carolina viewed marital breakups. Although the legislature made divorce easier during the antebellum period by allowing couples to dissolve their marriages in court instead of requiring a special act of the legislature, divorce remained rare among whites because of strong social disapproval. Silkenat finds the study of divorce among black North Carolinians complicated by slavery. Not only were slaves prohibited from contracting legal marriages; they also found their unions undermined by the constant threat of sale and by their inability to live with their spouses (except for Sunday visits) because of the small holdings typical of the state’s planters. Nonetheless, slaves took their informal marriages seriously, although the realities of slavery made them more accepting of couples of their race that voluntarily decided to part.

The Civil War greatly affected the stability of marriage for both blacks and whites in North Carolina. The separation of white couples because of men serving in the Confederate army strained many marriages. Silkenat presents postwar statistics that clearly show a growing number of divorces among North Carolinians due to separations caused by the Civil War and to relaxation of the social stigma attached to divorce among whites. For African Americans, the situation was more complicated. Black church leaders saw marital respectability as a way to bolster their race’s claims to freedom and citizenship, but they faced resistance from ex-slaves accustomed to informal marital relations, which allowed them to “quit” a spouse without legal permission and to marry someone else if they so desired.

Silkenat ends his book with a lengthy examination of changing attitudes toward debt. He finds that even though white North Carolinians before the Civil War ostensibly abhorred going into debt because of the belief that it enslaved people to their creditors, they indulged in considerable borrowing and lending beneath the camouflage of gift giving. Blacks in North Carolina were essentially unable to borrow money before the Civil War, he asserts, but when freedom gave them access to credit, they were reluctant to declare bankruptcy and thus risk a loss of respectability, even though the stigma was not as severe among whites as it once was.

Moments of Despair is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the American Civil War affected the lives of ordinary people. Although not all of the book’s conclusions are convincing, Silkenat marshals considerable evidence from disparate sources to create an impressive sociocultural study.