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

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I By his Own Hand Suicide 7

1 Most Horrible of Crimes

Suicide in the Old South 11

2 The Self-Slaying Epidemic

Suicide after the Civil War 23

3 The Legacy of the War We Suppose

Suicide in Medical and Social Thought 53

Part II To Loosen the Bands of Society Divorce 71

4 The Country Is Also a Party

Antebellum Divorce in Black and White 75

5 Connubial Bliss until He Entered the Army by Conscription

Civil War and Divorce 95

6 The Divorce Mill Runs Over Time

Marital Breakdown and Reform in the New South 113

Part III Enslaved by Debt The Culture of Credit and Debt 137

7 Sacredness of Obligations

Debt in Antebellum North Carolina 141

8 Out of Debt before I Die

The Credit Crisis of the Civil War 159

9 What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It

General Stores, Pawnshops, and Boardinghouses in the New South 173

10 Nothing Less than a Question of Slavery or Freedom

Populism and the Crisis of Debt in the New South 205

Conclusion 217

Appendix: Methodological Problems in Studying the History of Suicide 221

Notes 225

Bibliography 259

Index 291