Aberration of mind : suicide and suffering in the Civil War-era South /

Sommerville, Diane Miller,

Aberration of mind : suicide and suffering in the Civil War-era South / Diane Miller Sommerville. - 1 online resource (447 pages)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

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.

9781469643571 (e-book) 9781469643588 (e-book)


Suicide--History--Southern States--19th century.
Suicide--Social aspects--History--Southern States--19th century.


United States--History--Psychological aspects.--Civil War, 1861-1865
Southern States--Social conditions--History--19th century.


Electronic books.

HV6548.U52 / .S666 2018

362.280975/09034