Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina by David Silkenat (review)

For decades, historians of the American South have grappled with the issue of the Civil War as an agent of change. Some have claimed that the war constituted a true watershed, substantially altering the social, political, and economic landscape of the South. In contrast, others respond that despite some significant changes, notably emancipation, the new South that emerged following the war’s end had much in common with its antebellum counterpart. In recent years, the dividing line between those two stark positions has blurred and softened as historians have favored more nuanced views on the war as an engine of change. If much changed, much remained unchanged.

David Silkenat situates his fine study of Civil War–era North Carolina squarely within this important and ubiquitous debate, thus reinvigorating the (at times) staid dialogue about the long-term impact of the American Civil War. For Silkenat, the Civil War, and the economic, social, and cultural changes it ushered in, fundamentally transformed white and black southerners’ attitudes about suicide, divorce, and debt, the three areas that comprise the focus of this study. They function, according to Silkenat, as “barometers of moral change in nineteenth-century North Carolina” (3). These critical changes in attitude reflect larger societal shifts in the postwar South that fostered new and different relationships of the individual to larger communities and changing community values.

Because American historians have by and large slighted the topic of suicide, Silkenat’s analysis of attitudinal changes about suicide over time is of enormous value. Silkenat argues that the war, which devastated white southerners emotionally and materially, profoundly altered how North Carolinians viewed the act. Before the war, he asserts, suicide was roundly condemned in social, moral, and religious terms. Antebellum newspaper accounts characterized suicides as “horrific” or “terrible” (25). Before the war, white North Carolinians viewed suicide as “cowardly,” “base,” and a path to “eternal death” (13). Silkenat observes a significant change in the way suicide was characterized in newspapers and discourse after the war. White southerners now regarded suicide victims more sympathetically; newspaper stories after the war were less likely to condemn the act, labeling them as “sad” or “regrettable,” and instead heralded the lives and achievements of the suicidal dead.

Antebellum attitudes in North Carolina about divorce and debt experienced a similar trajectory following the war. White North Carolinians adhered to rigid notions of marriage and divorce. The public airing of divorce proceedings and the stigma attached to it, not legal impediments, argues Silkenat, accounts for exceedingly low divorce rates. The war, however, placed unprecedented strains on white marriages. Infidelity by wives and alcoholism by husbands contributed to “marital breakdown on a vast scale,” which in turn led to “a significant number of divorces” (103). Quantitative historians may question Silkenat’s marshaling of divorce data. The raw numbers are too small to be statistically significant, and the figures are not adjusted for population growth (84–85). But the quantitative analysis constitutes only a small part of Silkenat’s study, so any quibbles with numbers should not detract from a tightly constructed argument grounded in other evidence that lends credence to his argument. Importantly, the author notes that antebellum divorce litigants pitched their “stories” of marital woe to the larger community in rhetoric designed to justify the unusual decision to divorce. Following the war, he discerns a new tendency among white North Carolinians to remove divorce from the public realm and thus shield the principals from public scrutiny, a development he believes reflects an acknowledgment that the needs and desires of the individual had come to outweigh those of the community, a theme also played out in his treatments of suicide and debt. The war effected significant structural and economic changes that rendered the informal and communal antebellum system of credit inadequate to deal with unprecedented debt and financial insolvency. White...