Mary Boykin Chesnut
The daughter of a South Carolina Governor and U.S. Senator and the wife of a U.S. Senator and subsequent aide to Jefferson Davis, Mary Boykin Chesnut moved in the highest political circles during the most tumultuous time in our country’s history. For this reason, the journal that she kept during the four-year Confederate rebellion is one of the most important historical documents of the period. Published as A Diary from Dixie in 1905 and in a Pulitzer Prize-winning annotated edition entitled Mary Chesnut’s Civil War in 1981, the book has long been an invaluable resource for historians.
Chesnut, the daughter of planter and politician Stephen Decatur Miller and his wife Mary Boykin, was born near Stateburg in 1823. At seventeen, she married James Chesnut, Jr. and went to live on her father-in-law’s plantation outside Camden. For nearly the first twenty years of her married life, she suffered under the thumb of her domineering in-laws. Although her privileged lifestyle was made possible by the slave economy—500 enslaved persons toiled at Mulberry, the family estate—Mary Chesnut regarded slavery as a “monstrous institution” in part because of what she knew of her father-in-law’s sexual relations with his female slaves.
Her husband’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1858 freed her from the restrictions imposed upon her in the family circle, and she quickly became a social success in the nation’s capital. As war clouds loomed, she was an eyewitness to key historical events, such as the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the establishment of the Southern capital in Richmond. Close friends of the Davis family, Mary and James Chesnut played host to Jefferson Davis in Columbia where he spoke to the assembled citizens of the city from the front porch of the Chesnut Cottage, now a Hampton Street bed and breakfast, on October 5, 1864.
Mary Chesnut spent the post-war years in straitened circumstances, devoting much of her time and energy to revising her war diary. She died in Camden in 1886. One hundred years later, Chesnut was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
Chesnut, the daughter of planter and politician Stephen Decatur Miller and his wife Mary Boykin, was born near Stateburg in 1823. At seventeen, she married James Chesnut, Jr. and went to live on her father-in-law’s plantation outside Camden. For nearly the first twenty years of her married life, she suffered under the thumb of her domineering in-laws. Although her privileged lifestyle was made possible by the slave economy—500 enslaved persons toiled at Mulberry, the family estate—Mary Chesnut regarded slavery as a “monstrous institution” in part because of what she knew of her father-in-law’s sexual relations with his female slaves.
Her husband’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1858 freed her from the restrictions imposed upon her in the family circle, and she quickly became a social success in the nation’s capital. As war clouds loomed, she was an eyewitness to key historical events, such as the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the establishment of the Southern capital in Richmond. Close friends of the Davis family, Mary and James Chesnut played host to Jefferson Davis in Columbia where he spoke to the assembled citizens of the city from the front porch of the Chesnut Cottage, now a Hampton Street bed and breakfast, on October 5, 1864.
Mary Chesnut spent the post-war years in straitened circumstances, devoting much of her time and energy to revising her war diary. She died in Camden in 1886. One hundred years later, Chesnut was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
