Mary Boykin Chesnut

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Mary Boykin Chesnut
James Chesnut, Jr.

Mary Boykin Chesnut (

United States senator and officer in the Confederate States Army
.

Chesnut worked toward a final form of her book in 1881–1884, based on her extensive diary written during the war years. It was published in 1905, 19 years after her death. New versions were published after her papers were discovered, in 1949 by the novelist Ben Ames Williams, and in 1981 by the historian C. Vann Woodward, whose annotated edition of the diary, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981), won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary—the influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece" of the genre[2] — as the most important work by a Confederate author.

Life

Mary Chesnut was born on March 31, 1823, on her maternal grandparents'

U.S. senator. The family then lived in Charleston. Mary was the oldest of four children; she had a younger brother Stephen and two sisters: Catherine and Sarah Amelia.[1]

At age 13, Miller began her formal education in Charleston, South Carolina, where she boarded at Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies, which attracted daughters from the élite of the slaveowner class. Talvande was among the many French colonial refugees who had settled in Charleston from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) after the Hatian Revolution.[1] Miller became fluent in French and German, and received a strong education.[3]

Leaving politics, her father took his family to Mississippi, where he bought extensive acreage. It was a crude, rough frontier compared to Charleston. He owned three cotton plantations and hundreds of slaves. Mary lived in Mississippi for short periods between school terms but was reportedly more fond of the city.[1]

Marriage

In 1836, while in Charleston, 13-year-old Mary Boykin Miller met her future husband,

Mulberry, their plantation near Camden, South Carolina. His father, James Chesnut, Sr. (whom Mary referred to throughout her diaries as the “Old Colonel”), had gradually purchased and reunited the land holdings of his father John. He was said to have owned about five square miles at the maximum and to hold about 500 slaves by 1849.[1]

In 1858, by then an established lawyer and politician, James Chesnut, Jr. was elected a

Confederate Army. The couple resided at Chesnut Cottage in Columbia during the Civil War period.[5]

Intelligent and witty, Mary Chesnut took part in her husband's career, as entertaining was an important part of building political networks. She had her best times when they were in the capitals of Washington, D.C., and Richmond. She suffered from depression, in part because of her inability to have children, and she occasionally took opium.[6] The Chesnuts' marriage was at times stormy owing to their differences in temperament (she was more hot-tempered and sometimes considered her husband reserved), but their companionship was mostly warm and affectionate.[1]

As Mary Chesnut describes in her diary, the Chesnuts had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the upper society of the South and government of the Confederacy. Among them were, for example, Confederate general

Varina Howell.[6]

Also among these circles were Sara Agnes Rice Pryor and her husband Roger, a Congressman. Sara Pryor, Virginia Clay-Clopton and Louise Wigfall Wright wrote memoirs of the war years which were published in the early 20th century; their three works were particularly recommended by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to their large membership.[7]

Like many slaveowners, the Chesnuts faced financial difficulties after the war. They lost 1,000 slaves as property through emancipation.

freedmen. The younger Chesnut struggled to build the plantations and support his father's dependents.[citation needed
]

By his father's will, James Chesnut, Jr. had the use of Mulberry and Sandy Hill plantations only during his lifetime. In February 1885, both he and Mary's mother died. The plantations passed on to a male Chesnut descendant, and Mary Boykin Chesnut received almost no income. She also found her husband had many debts related to the estate which he had been unable to clear.[1] She struggled in her last year, dying in 1886 at her home Sarsfield in Camden, South Carolina. She was buried next to her husband in Knights Hill Cemetery in Camden, South Carolina.[9]

Writing and the diary

Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary on February 18, 1861, and ended it on June 26, 1865. She would write at the outset: “This journal is intended to be entirely objective. My subjective days are over.”

Mulberry Plantation near Camden. While the property was relatively isolated in thousands of acres of plantation and woodland, they entertained many visitors.[citation needed
]

Chesnut was aware of the historical importance of what she witnessed.[

mixed-race
children with enslaved women within their extended households.

The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.[10]

Examination of Mary Chesnut's papers has revealed the history of her development as a writer and of her work on the diary as a book. Before working to revise her diary as a book in the 1880s, Chesnut wrote a translation of French poetry, essays, and a family history. She also wrote three full novels that she never published: The Captain and the Colonel, completed about 1875; and Two Years of My Life, finished about the same time. She finished most of a draft of a third long novel, called Manassas. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, who edited the first two novels for publication by the University of Virginia Press in 2002 and wrote a biography of Chesnut, described them as her writing "apprenticeship."[1][11]

Chesnut used her diary and notes to work toward a final version in 1881–1884. Based on her drafts, historians do not believe she was finished with her work. 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. Williams' 1949 version was described as more readable, but sacrificing historical reliability and many of Chesnut's literary references.[1]

Publication history

Library resources about
Mary Boykin Chesnut
By Mary Boykin Chesnut

Reception and legacy

Chesnut's reputation rests on the fact that she created literature while keeping the sense of events unfolding; she described people in penetrating and enlivening terms and conveyed a novelistic sense of events through a "mixture of reportage, memoir and social criticism".[12] Critic and writer Edmund Wilson summarized her achievement:

The very rhythm of her opening pages at once puts us under the spell of a writer who is not merely jotting down her days but establishing, as a novelist does, an atmosphere, an emotional tone...Starting out with situations or relationships of which she cannot know the outcome, she takes advantage of the actual turn of events to develop them and round them out as if she were molding a novel.[1]: xv 

Chesnut has had some detractors, notably history professor Kenneth S. Lynn, of Johns Hopkins University. He described her work as a "hoax" and a "fabrication" in a 1981 New York Times review of Woodward's edition of the diaries. Lynn argues that the diary was "composed" (rather than simply rewritten) in the 1881-84 period, emphasizing that Chesnut both omitted a great deal from the original diaries and added much new material: "She dwelt upon the personalities of people to whom she had previously referred only briefly, plucked a host of bygone conversations from her memory and interjected numerous authorial reflections on historical and personal events."[13]

Because neither Chesnut nor her later editors conceded that she had heavily revised her work, Lynn's view that the whole project is a fraud is a minority one. In 1982, Woodward's edition of Chesnut's diary won a

Julie Harris
read these sections.

In 2000,

Mulberry Plantation, the house of James and Mary Boykin Chesnut in Camden, South Carolina, was designated a National Historic Landmark, due to its importance to America's national heritage and literature.[3]
The plantation and its buildings are representative of James and Mary Chesnut's elite slaveowner class.

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Woodward, C. Vann. "Introduction", Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, Mary Chesnut's Civil War, 1981.
  2. ^ Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962, pp. 279-80.
  3. ^ a b Nomination for Mulberry Plantation National Park Service, accessed May 29, 2008
  4. ^ "Mary Boykin Chesnut", Encyclopedia of World History
  5. ^ "Chesnut Cottage, Richland County (1718 Hampton St., Columbia)". National Register Properties in South Carolina. South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Retrieved January 7, 2014.
  6. ^ a b c Burns, Ken. The Civil War: “The Cause”, minute mark 42:00 and after.
  7. ^ Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937, University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 128–130
  8. ^ A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905, c1904, full online text available at Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina
  9. ^ Muhlenfeld (1992), pp. 218–19
  10. ^ Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Grimke Sisters and the Indelible Stain of Slavery", The Atlantic, December 2022.
  11. ^ Chesnut, Mary Boykin, Two Novels, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, ed., University of Virginia Press, 2002.
  12. New York Times
    , "Letters to the Editor" section, May 17, 1981.
  13. ^ Lynn, Kenneth S. "The Masterpiece That Became a Hoax", New York Times, April 26, 1981.

References

  • Chesnut, Mary Boykin. Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press 1981), ed. C. Vann Woodward.
  • Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth S., Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography, Foreword by C. Vann Woodward, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992

External links

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