Aberration of Mind : Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South / Diane Miller Sommerville.

A burden too heavy to bear: war trauma, suicide, and Confederate soldiers -- A dark doom to dread: women, suicide, and suffering on the Confederate homefront -- De lan' of sweet dreams: suffering and suicide among the enslaved -- Somethin' went hard agin her mind: suffering, suicide, and emancipation -- The accursed ills I cannot bear: Confederate veterans, suicide, and suffering in the defeated South -- The distressed state of the country: Confederate men and the navigation of economic, political, and emotional ruin in the postwar South -- All is dark before me: Confederate women and the postwar landscape of suffering and suicide -- Cumberer of the earth: the secularization of suffering and suicide.

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This book studies the meaning of suicide in the nineteenth-century South and how that meaning changed, if at all, as a result of the Civil War and its aftermath. It looks at the whole South while providing a more thorough examination than previous books of the dynamics of both the racial and gendered dimensions of suicide in the South during the long Civil War Era.

Description based on print version record.