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The view from the plantation.(Mary Chesnut)(Biography)
In the remarkable diary she kept during the Civil War, South Carolinian Mary Chesnut informs us early on that "I was a seceder, but I dreaded the future." For the next four years she records conversations, table talk ("One more year of Stonewall would have saved us"), and rumors of war. But her prophecy of June 1861, frank and enigmatic, stands: "Slavery has to go, of course--and joy go with it."
Twenty years after joy's emancipation, Chesnut revised and recast her journals, imparting to them a literary quality that sets the diary in the first rank of Civil War writings. Edmund Wilson, in his classic study Patriotic Gore, called Chesnut's diary "an extraordinary Document ... a masterpiece." But its author did not live to see its publication. Her lifetime literary earnings totaled $10: her pay for one article for the Charleston Weekly News and Courier.
Mary Chesnut was no plain folk; she was the daughter of South Carolina governor Stephen Miller, "credited with launching the 'positive good' defense of slavery," in historian C. Vann Woodward's words. Mary was educated at Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies in Charleston.
Her husband, James Chesnut, was the first U.S. senator to resign after Lincoln's election. Yet his refusal to jockey for office in the Confederacy tried Mary's always fragile patience: "I am certain of very few things in life now. This is one of them. Mr. C will never ask mortal man for any promotion for himself or for one of his family."
Mary is a little catty (she notices the dullness, plain-Janeness, and embonpoint of other ladies), and a tad prideful: "It was a way I had, always, to stumble in on the real show." Her reading is vast, her style tart, and her opinions strong. She defends Jefferson Davis to the last ditch, and she takes special satisfaction in reading purloined Yankee letters: "What a comfort the spelling was. We were willing to admit their universal free school education put their rank and file ahead of us literarily. Now these letters do not attest that fact. The spelling is comically bad."
- Mary Chesnut's diary about South.(TRAVEL)(THE CIVIL WAR)
- Newspaper article from: The Washington Times February 25, 2006 700+ words
...is just as well Harriet Beecher Stowe knew nothing about Mary Chesnut. The child of fervently puritanical parents and driven by...man she married were opposed to slavery. In every regard, Mary Chesnut, as she became, was a remarkable woman. On the one hand...
- Two Novels by Mary Chesnut.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
- Magazine article from: Journal of Southern History Frank, Lisa Tendrich November 1, 2003 700+ words
Edited by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld. Introduction by Elizabeth Hanson. Publications of the Southern Texts Society. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Pp. [xxxviii], 216. $29.50, ISBN 0-8139-2058-2.) Scholars have long recognized the importance of South Carolinian Mary
- Wartime memoirs by women in vogue.(FEATURES)(CURRENTS)
- Newspaper article from: The Christian Science Monitor September 14, 2005 700+ words
...After more than a half century of obscurity, the diary of Mary Chesnut - full of sharp commentary and sharp observations - has become...Similarly, greater interest in women's history has brought Mary Chesnut to the forefront. A high-society Southern matron and an...
- A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada W. Bacot, 1860-63.
- Magazine article from: The Mississippi Quarterly Kagle, Steven E. Sawaya, Francesca December 22, 1995 700+ words
...the achievements of these explorers. Diary from Dixie, Mary Chesnut's recreation of her Civil War diaries, was prominent for...edition of the original diaries under the title The Private Mary Chesnut. In the process of bringing out a number of important works...
- Recollections of a Southern Daughter.(Review) (book review)
- Magazine article from: Southern Cultures Smith, Julia Ridley June 22, 2001 700+ words
...underthings rifled through by an especially coarse soldier. Unlike Mary Chesnut, whose rich and opinionated chronicle of the Civil War is...one loved her as she wished." Readers looking for another Mary Chesnut might be disappointed by these rather plain accounts, but...
- Bosses and broomsticks: ritual and authority in antebellum slave...
- Magazine article from: Journal of Southern History O'Neil, Patrick W. February 1, 2009 700+ words
...bridesmaids arrayed themselves in "white swiss muslin." (1) Mary Chesnut's eyes, however, were more discriminating. As she committed...white) form and the African American perversion thereof. Mary Chesnut aimed particularly piercing barbs at the women in the party...
- The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868....
- Magazine article from: Journal of Southern History McCandless, Amy Thompson November 1, 2001 700+ words
...Family critiques of Confederate personnel echo those in Mary Chesnut's famous Civil War diaries. "Oh that I could lift up...Mary Maxcy Leverett wrote in 1862 (p. 129). Like Mary Chesnut, the Leveretts were eager for the promotion of their loved...
- Chesnut, Mary Boykin (Miller)
- Reference information from: The Oxford Companion to American Literature James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger January 1, 1995 700+ words
...of some 400,000 words was edited by C. Vann Woodward as Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1982) and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, although...the work substantially during Reconstruction. The Private Mary Chesnut (1984), edited by Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld...
