Mary chesnut quotes

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Which of the following words most accurately describes the tone of chesnut’s diary in 1865?

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Mary Boykin Chesnut

American Confederacy Civil War diarist (1823–1886)

Mary Boykin Chesnut (née Miller; March 31, 1823 – November 22, 1886) was an American writer noted for a book published as her Civil War diary, a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle."^[1] She described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern slaveowner society, but encompassed all classes in her book. She was married to James Chesnut Jr., a lawyer who served as a 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 t

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Written by: Barton A. Myers, Washington and Lee University

By the end of this section, you will:

Explain the various factors that contributed to the Union victory in the Civil War

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative alongside the Women during the Civil War Narrative to allow students to analyze and compare women’s experiences during the Civil War.

Mary Boykin Chesnut was born Mary Boykin Miller on March 31, 1823, in South Carolina. Her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, was a politician who promoted states’ rights and argued in favor of the position – held by other southerners such as John Calhoun – that slavery was a “positive good.” Miller became governor of South Carolina in 1828 and a U.S. senator in 1830. As the daughter of an elite southerner, Chesnut was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, at Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies. She was a celebrated beauty in Charleston society who traveled widely throughout the United States during the antebellum years, including to the American West and New Orleans.

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Mary Chesnut, wife of former US Senator James Chesnut, started to write a diary as South Carolina made the momentous decision to be the first state to secede from the Union. Her diary provides a unique perspective on the political and societal realities of life in the Confederacy as well as first-hand accounts of important events like the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War.

Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, the daughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, an eminent South Carolina politician, who served as governor and in Congress. In April 1840, she married Chesnut, eight years her senior and another member of South Carolina’s leading class. They went to live with James’ parents at Mulberry, the Chesnut plantation three miles south of Camden. Amid the strong personalities of the Chesnut clan, Mary struggled to adjust and found life more stimulating once they moved to Washington DC when her husband took his seat at the Senate. Chesnut later became the first southerner to resign his seat in the US Senate, following Lincoln's victory in the presidential