Mary Chestnut's Diary was Her Legacy

Keeping a journal is something many people do, especiall women. But rarely does anyone keep a journal thinking it may someday become a published account of what life is really like.

Mary Chestnut was born to politician father, Stephen Miller and Mary Boykin, the daughter of plantation owners in 1823. Her father's political career had a great deal of influence on Chestnut. He was a South Carolina senator at the time of her birth and had already served in the United States House of Representatives. Miller was a staunch supporter of states' rights, believing that states should have the power to set their own policies.

At the age of twelve, Chestnut met her future husband, James Chestnut, Jr., when he was visiting his niece at the Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies. Her family did not approve of James' romantic interest in the young Mary and they took her to Mississippi for a time in an attempt to discourage the romance.

But to no avail. Mary and James Chestnut were married April 23, 1840 when Mary was seventeen.

Like her father, James Chestnut was also politically inclined. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1858 and the couple moved to Washington, D.C. Mary became a part of the D.C. social life and developed an interest in political arguments. Neither she nor husband, James, believed in slavery, but they did uphold the right of states to make their own decisions.

The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency angered Southerners. Civil War loomed on the horizon and James Chestnut was the first Southern senator to resign from his post in protest.

On February 18, 1861, Chestnut began her diary of life in the South during the Civil War. She accompanied James as he traveled throughout the South and recorded events and people she encountered.

She was among the witnesses of the first shots of the Civil War in Charleston. She recorded changing fortunes during the war and their affects on the South. Chestnut wrote forthrightly about the problem of white slaveowners fathering children with the women slaves.

Chestnut wrote of her experiences of tending sick and wounded soldiers, criticized decisions of Southern leaders and her feelings of powerlessness being a woman in the South.

An excerpt from her diary tells a story of sadness and the horrible results of the Civil War:

June 27th, 1865 - An awful story from Sumter. An old gentleman, who thought his son dead or in a Yankee prison, heard some one try the front door. It was about midnight, and these are squally times. He called out, "What is that?" There came no answer. After a while he heard some one trying to open a window and he fired. The house was shaken by a fall. Then, after a long time of dead silence, he went round the house to see if his shot had done any harm, and found his only son bathed in his own blood on his father's door-step. The son was just back from a Yankee prison - one of his companions said - and had been made deaf by cold and exposure. He did not hear his father hail him. He had tried to get into the house in the same old way he used to employ when a boy.[1]

After the war, Chestnut evaluated her diaries spanning the four years of the Civil War. Consisting of over 400,000 words they were, indeed, voluminous tomes. But she felt they were worthy of publication and edited them down to just over 150,000 words.

She worked to prepare the manuscript for publication and published one story from her diary in the Charleston Weekly News and Courier.

However, recurring illnesses which affected her heart and lungs prevented her from completing the work. Chestnut died in November 1886.

Before her death, Chestnut gave her diary to Isabella D. Martin, a close friend, and urged her to have it published. It was first published in 1905 with the title "A Diary from Dixie."

It was reprinted as "Mary Chestnut's Civil War" by Yale University Press in 1991 and 1993. It is heralded as one of the most noteworthy and accountable historical writings of life in the South during the Civil War.

In 1982, Mary Chestnut's Civil War, which began as a journal of a young woman's life, experience and observations of the world around her, won the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Read the full text of Mary Chestnut's Civil War at Documenting the American South.

Sources:

[1] Documenting the American South
Encyclopedia of World Biography
About Famous People