Biography chestnut mary

What self-denial they do practice is to tell John Brown to come down here and cut our throats in Christ 's name…. In one passage she wrote, "God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad—this only I see. Like the patriarchs of our old men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.

Mary reflected often in her diary on marriage. One entry, after 20 years of marriage, muses: "It is only in books that people fall in love with their wives…. After all, is it not as with any other copartnership, say traveling companions? Their future opinion of each other, 'the happiness of the association,' depends entirely on what they really are, not what they felt or thought about each other before they had any possible way of acquiring accurate information as to character, habits, etc.

Love makes it worse. Which is the honest truth, but he cannot forbear the gratification of taunting me with his ruin, for which I am no more responsible than the man in the moon. But it is the habit of all men to fancy that in some inscrutable way their wives are the cause of all evil in their lives. You understate the agony, strive as you will to speak, the agony of heart, mind, body.

A few more men killed. A few more women weeping their eyes out, and nothing whatever decided by it more than we knew before the battle. Because the mob rules republics. And the mob always prefers Barrabas to Jesus Christ. And yet people do love to be popular and to have the votes of the mob. One begins to understand the power which the ability to vote gives the meanest citizen.

Although unfinished at the time of her death Mary Chesnut's Civil War is generally acknowledged today as the finest literary work of the Confederacy. Ken Burns used extensive readings from Chesnut's diary in his documentary television series, The Civil War, with Academy Award -nominated actress Julie Harris reading these sections. The plantation and its buildings are also representative of James and Mary Chesnut's elite social and political class.

In October of , the Chesnuts hosted President Jefferson Davis and his traveling party in their home. President Davis gave his last speech to the citizens of Columbia from the front porch of the Cottage. Original copies of the first publication in the Saturday Evening Post five issues and first editions of the English and American versions are on display at the Cottage.

Senate ; moved to Charleston after James resigned his office and departed to assist in the draft of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession ; briefly resided in Montgomery, Alabama, for the Confederate Provisional Congress; began and kept a private diary, later to be published as A Diary From Dixie, written in Charleston, Camden, Columbia, Montgomery, and Richmond —65 ; witnessed the attack on Fort Sumpter April 12, ; observed the decline and collapse of the Confederate government in Richmond and took flight as a war refugee ; laboriously revised and re-revised wartime diaries for possible publication — Mary Boykin Chesnut was one of the most remarkable women of the Civil War era.

Though she was well acquainted with many notables, she was not herself a celebrity. By the time of her death, few people in America knew her name. The publication, 19 years later, of a work based on her Civil War diaries has nonetheless made Mary Boykin Chesnut famous as the author of the most insightful view of the inner circle of Confederate society.

Comparatively little is known of Chesnut except for the person depicted in the diaries. They reveal her, however, quite fully. According to Bell Irvin Wiley, "Mary Chesnut enjoys the distinction of being one of the most amply portrayed women in American history. This is because of the frankness and fullness of her journal. It is the quality of her journals, rather than her deeds, which assures Mary Chesnut's place in history.

The writer of these diaries was a woman of intelligence, wit, and charm. She recognized the historic importance of the events unfolding around her and resolved to keep a daily record of those momentous days. She possessed the rigorous mind, the skill at writing, and the necessary intimate contact with Southerners in power to make such an undertaking successful.

Mary Boykin Chesnut was a woman of her times and lived a life that was characteristic of many antebellum Southern women of the privileged class, but the private Mary Chesnut was anything but typical. She possessed ideas and attitudes significantly unrepresentative of her gender, class, and region. House of Representatives. At the time of her birth, he was a senator in the South Carolina Legislature.

By Mary's fifth birthday, he had been elected governor of their state. The political atmosphere of her home life doubtless had a potent effect on Mary, who was quickly maturing into a young sophisticate who loved nothing better than reading speeches and engaging in rousing debate. Within eight years of her birth, three siblings Stephen Decatur, Jr.

A powerful influence in Mary's youth was her maternal grandmother, Mary Whitaker Boykin , who undertook to teach Mary the art of plantation household management. South Carolina law prevented Governor Miller from seeking a second term, so in , he successfully campaigned for the U. He was a "firebreathing nullifier," a radical states' rights advocate whose politics reflected the mood of South Carolina at the time.

His campaign slogan expressed the widespread hostility felt in South Carolina against the U. Congress: "Three ways to reform Congress; the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box! In , he sold his property and made preparations to move to Mississippi, where he owned plantations being managed by overseers. This was an unexpected change for one so successful in politics and so inexperienced as an agriculturalist.

In all likelihood, the rising popularity of John C. Calhoun in South Carolina was pushing Miller out of the limelight. For whatever reason, Miller decided to try his hand at planting in the deep south. Chesnut did not accompany the rest of her family at first. There, she received the usual instruction deemed necessary for women of her position.

Fortunately, she also gained a more serious academic background in history, rhetoric, natural science, German, and a mastery of French. In Charleston, Chesnut learned to love the city, an affection that would be abiding.

Biography chestnut mary

As she grew older, her need for the bustle and stimulation of urban life, and her loathing of the boredom of quiet plantation life, developed into an illness. When residing in the country, chronic headaches invariably plagued her, but the symptoms would disappear upon arrival in Washington, Richmond, or Charleston. Her own words confirm that her illness was probably psychosomatic.

The name of my disease is longing to get away from here and go to Richmond. James became Mary's regular escort, accompanying her to dances, on strolls along the Battery, and to the theater, to see "whatever was worth seeing," she wrote, "and a good deal besides. As her diary reveals, Mary came to detest slavery as an abominable social evil. Her first revulsion of bondage occurred when she came upon the captured Seminole chief Osceola being exhibited on the street.

It seemed to me that my country had not dealt magnanimously with these aborigines of the soil. In , Mary's father died in Mississippi. After a brief sojourn there to assist her mother in settling the estate, she returned to Camden and became engaged to James. On June 23, , the year-old Mary married James, who was then Although there is scant information about Chesnut during the next 20 years, it is known that life at Mulberry Plantation was not pleasant for her.

Frustrated that she was not mistress of her own household, she lived in submission to her mother-in-law's close ordering of the home, feeling she had no specific role in the scheme of things. To make matters worse, Chesnut's inability to become pregnant increased her insecurity and unhappiness. She lamented that her mother-in-law, "was bragging to me with exquisite taste—me a childless wretch, of her twenty-seven grandchildren, and Col.

Chesnut, a man who rarely wounds me, said to her, 'You have not been a useless woman in this world' because she had so many children. And what of me! God help me—no good have I done—to myself or anyone else—with the power I boast of so—the power to make myself loved. Where am I now. Where are my friends. I am allowed to have none. There surely was never anyone like her—physically and intellectually so perfectly fearless—fearless of facts and fearless of the truth—never afraid where it would lead her or land her.

Outlets for Mary's creativity were few, and she was beset by recurring bouts of depression. She sublimated her despondency over her childlessness by occasionally "borrowing" one or more of her nieces or nephews for extended visits. Excursions to the city were fairly reliable therapy for Chesnut's depression, but they were not frequent.

Like many women of her time, she took opium to help her cope with her problems. Chesnut was aware of the historical importance of what she witnessed. Chesnut edited the diary, wrote new drafts in — for publication, and retained the sense of events unfolding without foreknowledge. She had the sense of the South's living through its time on a world stage, and she captured the growing difficulties of all classes of the Confederacy as they faced defeat at the end of the war.

Chesnut analyzed and portrayed the various classes of the South throughout the war, providing a detailed view of Southern society and especially of the mixed roles of men and women. She was forthright about the complex and fraught situations related to slavery, particularly the abuses of women's sexuality and the power exercised by white men.

For instance, Chesnut discussed the problem of white slaveowners' fathering mixed-race children with enslaved women within their extended households. The mulattos one sees in every family 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.

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 s, 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 ; 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 and wrote a biography of Chesnut, described them as her writing "apprenticeship. Chesnut used her diary and notes to work toward a final version in — 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 as a heavily edited and abridged edition. Williams' version was described as more readable, but sacrificing historical reliability and many of Chesnut's literary references.

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". 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.

Chesnut has had some detractors, notably history professor Kenneth S. Lynn , of Johns Hopkins University. But this was a time of great political tension in the United States. The Northern and Southern sections of the country had been arguing over several issues—including slavery and the power of the national government to regulate it—for many years.

Growing numbers of Northerners believed that slavery was wrong. Some people wanted to outlaw it, while others wanted to prevent it from spreading beyond the Southern states where it was already allowed. But slavery played a big role in the Southern economy and culture. As a result, many Southerners felt threatened by Northern efforts to contain slavery.

They believed that each state should decide for itself whether to allow slavery. They did not want the national government to pass laws that would interfere with their traditional way of life. This ongoing dispute came to a crisis in November , when Abraham Lincoln —; see entry was elected president of the United States. Lincoln was a Northerner who opposed slavery, although he wanted to eliminate it gradually rather than outlaw it immediately.

Following Lincoln's election, many people in the South felt that the national government could no longer represent their interests. Several Southern states decided to secede withdraw from the United States and form a new country that allowed slavery, called the Confederate States of America. But it soon became clear that Northern leaders were willing to fight to keep the Southern states in the Union.

The two sides went to war a few months later. Chesnut's husband was the first Southern senator to resign from his position in the U. Congress following Lincoln's election. Before long, he became a delegate representative in the provisional temporary Confederate Congress. The Chesnuts moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where a number of influential Southerners were meeting to establish a government for their new nation.

Chesnut's home was one of the most popular gathering places for Confederate officials. On many occasions, her living room was full of important people socializing, exchanging information, and holding political debates. In February , Chesnut began recording what she saw and heard during these meetings in a diary. One of Chesnut's best friends during this time was Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis —; see entry.

This friendship gave her access to the top officials in the new government, which put her in a unique position to record what was going on in the Confederacy. In fact, the observations she made in her journal covered everything from parties and romances, to rumors and disagreements, to battles and funerals. Chesnut witnessed some of the major events of the Civil War.

Her husband participated in the April bombing of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which marked the official start of the war, as she watched from a rooftop in town. Following the Confederate victory in the first major battle of the war, the First Battle of Manassas also known as the First Battle of Bull Run in July , she visited wounded Confederate soldiers in Richmond, Virginia.

Chesnut moved to Richmond in , when her husband became the personal aide to President Davis. They lived near the Confederate White House and entertained generals and other important people. She moved to Columbia, South Carolina, in , where she helped out in an army hospital. She recorded all of these experiences in her diary. During the early years of the war, Chesnut kept her journal in an elegant red leather-bound book with a little brass lock.

As the war went on, and the South suffered from severe supply shortages, however, she ended up writing on scraps of paper and in the back of old cookbooks. Calling herself "a close observer. Chesnut stopped writing in her diary in June , shortly after the Civil War ended in a Union victory. She and her husband returned to Mulberry Plantation to find it badly damaged, and all of her family's possessions and crops destroyed.

Their fortune gone, she began running a small dairy business to help make ends meet. In the s, she translated several French novels and tried her hand at writing fiction. In , Chesnut began revising her Civil War diary for publication. During the war, she was too busy to provide a complete record of events as they occurred. Instead, she made detailed notes that she could look back on later to help her remember.

She always intended to flesh out her description of the war. Chesnut worked on the project for several years, but never finished the revision to her satisfaction. She struggled through legal and financial troubles, and had to deal with the death of her husband and her mother during this time. She also suffered from heart problems herself.

Chesnut died on November 22, , in Camden, South Carolina. Shortly before her death, Chesnut asked a trusted younger friend, Isabella Martin, to take care of her diaries and finish preparing them for publication. But after looking at the journals, Martin felt that they were too personal to be published. She recognized the historical value of the documents, but she worried about embarrassing the people who were mentioned.

So she set the diaries aside for many years. Avary read Chesnut's journals and insisted on publishing them. But the book was much different from the original journal entries Chesnut had written during the Civil War. Martin, who served as editor of the book, cut nearly half of the material in order to avoid offending people. It still received good reviews, however, and was frequently quoted by Civil War historians over the years.

A novelist named Ben Ames Williams published another edition of Chesnut's diaries in This edition was more complete than the first, but Williams still cut or changed Chesnut's original words. The complete, unchanged journal did not appear until Mary Chesnut's Civil War, edited by historian C. Vann Woodward, won the Pulitzer Prize upon its publication.

It has since become the most famous diary of the Civil War period. Muhlenfeld called it "a stunning eyewitness account of the society that was the Confederacy. Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller. A Diary from Dixie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Reprint, New York : Random House, New York: Oxford University Press, DeCredico, Mary A. Madison, WI: Madison House, Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth.

Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography. Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut's Civil War. One of the reasons that Chesnut's diary became the most famous remembrance of the Civil War was that she covered such a wide range of topics. During the four years that she kept a journal, she recorded her thoughts on all of the most important people and events of the war.

The following excerpts provide a sample of some of the issues she covered. This fort, located in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, was held by Federal troops. Southern leaders viewed these troops as a symbol of Northern authority and were determined to remove them. The Confederacy gained control of the fort after two days of intense bombing.

Chesnut watched the battle from the roof of a house in Charleston:. There was a sound of stir all over the house, pattering of feet in the corridors. All seemed hurrying one way, I put on my double gown and went too. It was to the housetop. The shells were bursting.