A prospective reader's first reaction on seeing the title of David Silkenat's study of North Carolina in the Civil War era might be one of surprise that there were only “moments” of despair in that state at that time. This is not a book about North Carolina's response to defeat in 1865, however, but about the shift in “the moral framework through which North Carolinians interpreted their world” between 1820 and 1905, a shift that severed many of those threads long assumed to have linked the Old South to the New, and North Carolinians to each other, that prompted some to suicide and others to separation, and left many in a parlous financial state in a world turned upside down (1). Although the Civil War is in many respects at the heart of this study, Silkenat's thesis is not about either the war or Reconstruction, as historians have assessed the impact of both, but about the broader forces at play in the disintegration of tradition and the reformulation of new communal expectations and assumptions, of which those concerning suicide, marriage and credit are, Silkenat proposes, especially revealing about change in the nineteenth century. In short, this is an exploration of the dissolution of the moral, legal and racial ties that bound both the imagined (for whites) and enforced (for blacks) communities of antebellum North Carolina and the construction, after 1861, of new behavioural norms within those communities, norms informed by war, affected by defeat, but ultimately defined by race.

At its most straightforward – and in places this is a far from straightforward thesis – Silkenat's study serves, in its own words, “to complicate our understanding of the lasting consequences of the Civil War in the American South” and, most importantly, to disaggregate these from Confederate defeat (5). The book opens – dramatically – with the images of the dead and dying from the Seven Days battles in 1862, extracting from the mix of maimed and wounded two figures in particular: John Roland, a teenager who committed suicide by cutting his own throat before leaping from a hospital window, and Dr. Eugene Grissom, who witnessed the death and who, forty years later, killed himself. These individual deaths bookend a detailed and thoughtful discussion of a difficult subject, although Silkenat tends – as many scholars do – rather glibly to read backwards from a late twentieth-century diagnosis (PTSD) to nineteenth-century suicides in his discussion of Confederate veterans. Nevertheless, his broader analysis of changing responses to suicide, particularly within black communities after emancipation, offers a genuinely original and probing reassessment of the full meaning of freedom.

If the freedom to take one's own life was racially coded “as black before the Civil War and white afterwards,” other kinds of freedom were similarly segregated, in particular the freedom to dissolve a marriage (68). The sundering of matrimonial bonds, Silkenat shows, made whites fearful that Confederate defeat had “heralded a period of moral decay and decline,” especially as the post-1865 era witnessed a rise in the number of men seeking divorce, more certain now that the gender imbalance in a generation reduced by war favoured their finding a new and perhaps more desirable wife. The white response of stricter legislation designed to slow this “slide into depravity” was not, however, welcomed by black communities. Unsurprisingly distrustful of legislation in any manifestation, North Carolina's black communities turned to “family, neighborhoods, and churches, to enforce moral standards” (135). Postwar debates over suicide and divorce, of course, took place in an economically unstable environment, and were conducted within the context of debt and credit networks that themselves were in flux. Here, too, Silkenat argues, ideas of debt and in particular indebtedness were informed by racial assumptions and by the breakdown of the “gift economy credit system” through which antebellum whites had negotiated both financial and social relationships (151).

Silkenat has set himself a challenging task in a study that no short review can do full justice to. With the exception of suicide among Confederate veterans and emancipated slaves, the ground he covers has been ploughed so rigorously and by so many historians that tracing new patterns in the furrows might seem impossible, certainly daunting. Yet by judiciously juxtaposing individual stories with a broader statistical analysis of the subjects and the society he is studying, Silkenat succeeds in challenging many of our assumptions about nineteenth-century North Carolina. He reminds us that “[s]uicide, divorce, and debt can be among the most profound and defining events in an individual's life” and that, if one is seeking to comprehend the changes wrought by the Civil War, then attitudes to all three may be the best place to start (218). In so doing, Silkenat has not just established his own mark on the historiography of the Civil War, but erected new signposts for others to follow in the ongoing process of mapping the tortuous route from the Old South to the New.