Mary Boykin Chesnut

Portrait of Mary Boykin Chesnut painted by Samuel Osgood, 1856.

(March 31, 1823 – November 22, 1886), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut better known as Mary Boykin Chesnut, was a South Carolina author noted for writing a sophisticated diary describing the American Civil War and her circles of Southern society. In 1981 it was republished under the title Mary Chesnut's Civil War and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

As the daughter of a governor and senator from South Carolina and wife of senator and Confederate General James Chestnut, Jr., who was an aide to President Jefferson Davis, she knew intimately the Confederacy's political and military leaders. Because of her extensive travels she was at Montgomery when the new nation was founded, at Charleston when the war started, and at Richmond during many crises.

Early life

She was born Mary Boykin Miller on March 31, 1823, on her grandparents' plantation, near Statesburg, South Carolina. Her parents were Mary Boykin (1804–85) and her husband Stephen Decatur Miller (1788–1838). When she was born her father was one of South Carolina's state senators. In 1828 he became the governor of South Carolina and in 1830 a U. S. Senator.

She was educated in Charleston at Mme. Ann Marsan Talvande's boarding school where she became fluent in French and studied history, rhetoric, the natural sciences and literature.

Marriage

After many years’ courtship, Mary Boykin Miller married James Chesnut, Jr. (1815–85) on April 23, 1840. He was a lawyer and politician eight years her senior and later became a U.S. Senator from South Carolina like her father. He served in the Senate from 1858 until South Carolina's secession from the Union in 1860. He was the first to resign his seat in the U.S. Senate before the war.

Once the Civil War broke out, James Chesnut, Jr. became an aide to President Jefferson Davis and a Brigadier general in the Confederate Army.

Mary Chesnut was intelligent and witty and took actively part in her husband’s career. The Chesnuts’ marriage was at times stormy due to difference in temperament (she was hot-tempered and passionate and came occasionally to regard her husband as cool and reserved). Nevertheless their companionship was mostly warm and affectionate. They had no children.

Besides knowing so many influential leaders, Mary Chestnut also lived in both Confederate capitals—Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia—while they were the government seats. Her husband's plantation was in South Carolina, and in fact her home in Columbia, South Carolina lay right in the path of Sherman's destructive march through the South. As such, Chestnut is poised to offer very interesting commentary on the fire that burned much of that city. Mary and her husband gave their all to the Confederacy, and lost much of what they had because of the Civil War.

As Mary Chesnut described in depth in her diary, the Chesnuts had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the society of the South and the Confederacy. Among their friends were, for example, Confederate general John Bell Hood, Confederate politician John L. Manning, Confederate general and politician John S. Preston and his wife Caroline, Confederate general and politician Wade Hampton III, Confederate politician Clement C. Clay and his wife Virginia, and Confederate general and politician Louis T. Wigfall and his wife Charlotte. The Chesnuts were also intimate family friends of President Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina Howell.

Mary Boykin Chesnut died in her own home in Camden, South Carolina in 1886 and was buried next to her husband in Knights Hill Cemetery in Camden, South Carolina.

Her diary

Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary on February 18, 1861, and ended it on June 26, 1865. During much of that time she was an eyewitness to many historic events as she accompanied her husband to many significant places of the Civil War. Among them were Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia, where the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America convened, Charleston, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, Columbia, South Carolina, where her husband served as the Chief of the Department of the Military of South Carolina and brigadier general in command of South Carolina reserve forces, and again Richmond, where her husband served as an aide to president. At times they also lived with her parents-in-law in a house called Mulberry Plantation near Camden, in the midst of thousands of acres of plantation and woodland but with many visitors.

The diary was of her impression of events as they unfolded during the Civil War, but she also edited it after the war for publication. She was very politically aware, and analyzed the changing fortunes of the South and its various classes. She also portrayed southern society and the mixed roles of men and women, including the complex and fraught situations related to slavery. For instance, Chesnut confronted the problem of white men fathering children with enslaved women in their own extended households.

She was conscious of trying to create a work of literature and described the people in penetrating and enlivening terms. She revised it in the 1870s and 1880s for publication, but kept its character of unfolding and surprising events. Literary scholars have called the Chesnut diary the most important work by a Confederate author. Chesnut captured the growing difficulties of all classes of the Confederacy.

Because Chesnut had no children, before her death she gave her diary to her closest friend Isabella D. Martin and urged her to have it published. The diary was first published in 1905 as a heavily edited and abridged edition.

Slavery

This diary also provides a unique view of slavery. A staunch abolitionist, Chestnut hated slavery less for the cruel treatment of the slaves than for the insolent behavior of many of them. Her husband's slaves were well taken care of, and did less work than they consumed in goods. Mary recounts many horrific tales of what happened when the slaves were set free—a story of a white family going along a road and picking up a wagonload of Negro infants which had been abandoned by parents enjoying their freedom, for example. She never questions that slavery is wrong, but she does argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe's account of slavery was the exception, not the rule. This is an interesting perspective, whatever the truth of it.

Publication history

• 1905, A Diary from Dixie.

• 1949: An expanded edition, edited by Ben Ames Williams and annotated to identify the many different people and places.

• 1981, a new edition entitled Mary Chesnut's Civil War edited by C. Vann Woodward.

Honors and Legacy

In 1982, Mary Chesnut's Diary, edited by C. Vann Woodward, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ken Burns used extensive readings from Chesnut's diary in his 1990 documentary television series, The Civil War. Academy Award-nominated actress Julie Harris read these sections. thumb|200px|U.S. National Historic Landmark Mulberry Plantation On March 1, 2000, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that Mulberry Plantation, the house of James and Mary Boykin Chesnut in Camden, South Carolina, had been designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest designation, due to its importance to America's national heritage and literature. The plantation was where Mary Boykin Chesnut resided when she wrote most of her diary. She recorded events of the Civil War and her observations on their effect on the home front and the South. The plantation and its buildings was also representative of James and Mary Chesnut's elite social and political class.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller, C. Vann Woodward, and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld. 1984. The Original Civil War Diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195035119
• Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller, and Ben Ames Williams. 1949. A Diary from Dixie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0395083516
• Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller, and C. Vann Woodward. 1981. Mary Chesnut's Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300024592
• DeCredico, Mary A. 1996. Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman's Life. Madison, Wis: Madison House. ISBN 094561246X
• Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. 1981. Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography. Southern biography series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0807108529

External links

• Electronic copy of Mary Chesnut's A Diary from Dixie, 1905 edition, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill
• Mary Boykin Chesnut, "About Famous People" Biography
• Mulberry Plantation (James and Mary Boykin Chesnut House), National Historic Landmarks Program, National Park Service

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