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  • The Seduction and Suicide of Mariah MurrayA Civil War Era Tragedy
  • Victoria E. Bynum (bio)

Just before daybreak on Sunday, June 29, 1873, Anderson Broaden, a neighbor, discovered Mariah Murray’s lifeless body in Cedar Grove, a community in the northwest corner of Orange County, North Carolina. He had stopped by her house to deliver a message in response to a perplexing conversation he’d had with her the previous night. Mariah, he later explained to investigators, had visited his home to make an unusual request: she implored him to contact her parents-in-law, James and Elizabeth Murray, to tell them to visit her house as early as possible the next day. According to Anderson, Mariah wanted the Murrays to take charge of her children–their grandchildren—immediately.1

Although it was around 11:00 p.m. when Mariah left, Anderson did as his friend asked. After hiking over to the elder Murrays’ home, he stopped by Mariah’s house on the way back. By now it was the wee hours of the morning, so he called through the door to make sure he was heard. When no one answered, Anderson entered the home, where he found Lucinda Brown, Mariah’s domestic helper, fast asleep. Lucinda, when awakened and asked about the whereabouts of Mariah, replied that she had last seen her sitting on the bed, right before she herself had retired for the evening. Still puzzled by Mariah’s strange request of him, Anderson mounted the stairs and entered an upper floor room, where he discovered her body suspended from a cord. Horrified, he reached out and touched her. Finding “no movement of the body,” he immediately cried out, raising an “alarm” in the neighborhood.2

The tragic death of Mariah Murray speaks to the long-term effects of the American Civil War as well as its particular effects on women. In recent decades, historians have made great strides in chronicling and analyzing women’s wartime contributions to voluntary societies, their struggles on the home front, and their presence in workplaces as varied as homes, fields, hospitals, and brothels. Women, we now know, did far more than wonder and wait while husbands and sons suffered and died on Civil War battlefields.3

Still, there is much more to know. Women not only struggled in wartime to keep body and soul together; some struggled to keep their very sanity. In the wake of current attention given to Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, historians are reassessing the trauma inflicted on soldiers by the Civil War. Women [End Page 21] also suffered trauma on account of war, although under different circumstances and with perhaps different effects. Mariah’s suicide, for example, which occurred eight years after the war’s end, is easily attributed to psychological factors rather than societal issues. A closer look, however, at the heart-wrenching details of her death illuminates the constraints and privileges, of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the attendant dangers of unbridled sexuality, and the personal despair she felt at having nowhere left to turn. Those details also reveal a drama thoroughly grounded in the Civil War, a war that affected the nation well beyond restoral of a formal peace.4


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Surgical photograph…prepared under the supervision of…War Department, Surgeon General’s Office, Army Medical Museum (1861-1865).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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Anderson Broaden’s discovery of Mariah’s lifeless body created an immediate panic in the small hamlet of Cedar Grove. In short order, David Thompson, T. C. Ellis, and Alexander Clark responded to Broaden’s cries for help, entered Mariah’s home, and rushed upstairs to view the ghastly scene. Finding her hands and feet to be warm, the three men cut down Mariah’s body in a futile attempt to save her life. There was nothing left to do but call the coroner, who quickly assembled a jury of twelve men to investigate the circumstances and causes of Mariah’s death. Soon, her home was filled with people. Witnesses were called to the Murray house that very day, their depositions recorded in longhand. Mariah, the committee soon concluded, had taken her own life...

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