When a writer sits down to pen the events of history today, s/he has a vast array of resources from which to draw information regarding the chosen topic. While this is all well and good, is it not more exciting to write about events as they actually take place? When this happens, the reader is presented a greater likelihood of experiencing what truly took place at the time. By being in the center of the action, the author is offered enhanced opportunity to pepper the prose with the physical and emotional experiences of the occasion. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s diary achieved this feat.
Born March 31, 1823 on Mount Pleasant Plantation in Stateburg, South Carolina, Mary was the eldest child of Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller. Her father first served as a U. S. Representative and was then elected governor of South Carolina in 1829. In 1831, he became a U. S. Senator. Following her father’s election, the family, now including Mary’s brother and two sisters, moved to Charleston.
Mary’s education began at home and at the age of 13, she was enrolled in Mme. Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies in Charleston. Here she was educated with the elite of South Carolina’s planter class and received an excellent education, which included becoming fluent in both German and French.
When Senator Miller retired from politics, he moved his family to Mississippi where he owned an extensive amount of land, divided into three plantations. Having been raised in South Carolina, Mary considered Mississippi to be crude in comparison and lived there for only short periods of time; preferring instead to spend the majority of her time in Camden.
In 1836 when she was 13, Mary met the man who would later become her husband. For the next three years, her parents expressed opposition to this gentleman, who was eight years her senior. However, when Mary turned 16, her interest in him grew stronger and on April 23, 1840, 17-year old Mary became the bride of James Chesnut, Jr.
James and Mary lived with his parents on their plantation, Mulberry, located on the outskirts of Camden and one of the largest in South Carolina. His father, James Sr., (lovingly referred to by Mary as ‘the old Colonel’) had been able to regain ownership of all the land his father, John, had previously owned, which was said to have been approximately five square miles in size.
Over the course of the next 20 years, the Chesnuts divided their time between Mulberry and Camden. In 1858, Chesnut, by then a prominent lawyer and politician, became a US Senator. Mary now added Washington to her social circles and began to develop friendships with numerous politicians; many of which would go on to become high ranking figures in the future Confederacy. Some of the more prominent individuals she listed on her social calendar were Varina & President Jefferson Davis, Virginia & politician Clement C. Clay, Charlotte & politician Louis T. Wigfall and Confederate General John Bell Hood.
After the election of President Abraham Lincoln, James returned to South Carolina. Once there, he participated in the creation of the Ordinance of Secession and went on to serve as a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. He joined the Confederate Army where he served as an aide to both General P. G. T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis. During this time, he received a promotion to the rank of general.
Throughout the war years, Mary traveled extensively with General Chesnut. The more elite cities of the South – Richmond, Columbia, Montgomery and Charleston - were constantly on her list of places where she was hostess to the elite of the Southern forces. It was during this time she began to pen what would become her celebrated portrayal of the Confederacy. Though she moved within the upper-class circles of Southern society, within her diary she made reference to individuals of all levels.
After the war, the Chesnuts returned home to Camden. James Sr. died in 1866 and left Mulberry and Sandy Field Plantations to James Jr. As was the case for the vast majority of Southern landowners at that time, Mary and James were faced with a heavy debt load for both locations.
In an effort to help pay off what they owed, Mary made her first attempt to have her diaries published. When this failed, she endeavored to write fiction. Though she was able to complete three novels, none of them were ever published in her lifetime. She wrote The Captain & the Colonel and Two Years of My Life in 1875 and later Manassas, which was still a draft form of a longer novel at the time of her death.
In 1880, she returned to her diaries. This time she began to revise them in a much broader manner. She successfully modified them into an unfinished book form entitled, A Diary from Dixie.
James Jr. died in February 1885. Due to the terms of his father’s will, Mulberry and Sandy Field Plantations would belong to James during his lifetime, then pass on to a male Chesnut descendant due to the fact he and Mary were never able to have children. Mary received little financial support after her husband’s death and was saddled with numerous debts he left related in some way to the estate. Mary died the following year at her home, Sarsfield, and was buried next to her husband in Knights Hill Cemetery, Camden, SC.
The time frame of Mary’s diary begins on February 18, 1861 and ended on June 26, 1865. As an eye-witness to this period of American history, Mary used her mocking wit, quick astuteness, keen sense of irony and symbolic vision in diary format. She captured a truly accurate representation of life in the South from a landowner’s perspective before, during and after the Civil War. Acutely aware of the importance of what was taking place, she described the extensive transformation from the lifestyle previously enjoyed on the plantation during the antebellum world to that of the war-torn society which followed in the wake of the conflict.
Prior to her death, Mary entrusted her diary to Isabella D. Martin, her closest friend, and strongly urged her to see to it the information was published. Though Mary’s work remained unfinished at that time, it was later revised and published as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War in 1905.
In 1949, novelist Ben Ames Williams revised her work to include papers Mary had written which were discovered after the 1905 edition was released.
In 1981, historian C. Vann Woodward included additional comments and footnotes. When completed, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1982 and was listed as the most important work created by a Confederate author. Her diary was also used by Ken Burns in a documentary series for television entitled The Civil War.
In 2000, Mulberry Plantation was named a National Historic Landmark due to the part it had played in the national heritage and literature of the United States.
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