During the war, Mary came in contact with nearly all of the Confederacy’s most influential leaders. Mary Boykin's Civil War. Literary scholars have called the Chesnut diary the most important work by a Confederate author. Despite the fact that James, Jr. was the only son, little of that property was in his name. She described people in penetrating and enlivening terms, and captured the growing difficulties of all classes in the Confederacy. When Chesnut was twelve, she was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, to history of the Civil War. The place and its occupants symbolized the gentile society of the old guard planter elite, which she often criticized but could not help but feel nostalgia for on the eve of its demise. In 1845, she became seriously ill with what she termed gastric fever, one of the recurring maladies that plagued her throughout her adult life. There are browsing on the lawn, when Kentucky bluegrass flourishing, Devon cows and sheep, horses, mares and colts. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, 1823-1886 Name of her book: A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Wife of James Chesnut… James Chesnut was intimately involved in the formation of the Confederacy and served in a variety of high-level posts. After Mary's death, printed versions of her work appeared in the In 1848, she and James built a house in the town of Camden whereshe was able to escape the tedium of the plantation. She was 85. I did not know before how utterly hopeless was our situation. Decredico, Mary A. 1823-1886 American plantation owner; diarist. Her servants had been true to her; no blandishments of freedom had drawn Ellen or Molly away from 'Miss Mary.' James Chesnut took his 17-year-old bride to live at Mulberry, the plantation home of the Chesnuts, located three miles south of Camden. In 1873 Mary began to His election to the U.S. Senate in 1858 was considered a victory for the moderates over the fire-eaters. He was a lawyer and politician eight years her senior. Some of the characters could be works of fiction. Washington, D.C. the only item that Mary published during her life. She often felt inadequate and childish under what she perceived as the reproachful watch of her in-laws. Southern women, whom Mary felt were also enduring a kind of slavery in When her father was elected governor of South Carolina in The 1981 version of the diary, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, was edited by prominent historian C. Vann Woodward and is considered the most reliable edition. The house was built with considerable input from Mary, and featured a comfortable library with a bay window that overlooked the grounds, which was originally more than 50 acres. It was peppered with frank, often critical remarks about Southern leaders, people within her social circle, and even her friends and family. Her journal of the war years gives recorded the stories she heard about various battles as well as her married James on April 23, 1840, at the age of seventeen. In 1852, he was elected to the South Carolina Senate and served as its president from 1856 to 1858. battles, she soon began to write of the horrors of the war as well. She was enrolled in Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies in Charleston, where she excelled in a course of study which stressed foreign language, history, rhetoric, literature and science – most unusual for the times. history, as well as instruction in music, singing, and dancing. Mrs. Chesnut lies buried in the Charming, outgoing, intelligent, and inquisitive, she had a unique ability to extract first-hand, often sensitive, information from a litany of political and military leaders that she came into contact with on an almost daily basis through the many social gatherings she hosted or attended. Some months before her death, Mary gave her diary to her closest friend, Isabella D. Martin, and urged her to have it published. She died in 1886 and was buried next to her husband in Knights Hill Cemetery in Camden, South Carolina. Although editors removed some material, even these She and James also decided that they should have a home of their own closer to the Camden town center. Woodward summed up the significance of the diary in the following passage: The importance of Mary Chesnut’s work…lies not in autobiography, fortuitous self-revelations, or opportunities for editorial detective work. She references Princess Charlotte who happily married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1816. By the spring of 1876, Mary had made the initial edit of the years between 1861 and 1864, and then abruptly stopped work. Her intention was to eliminate all of what she deemed trivial and personal and to provide a solid historical accounting of her experiences. resign from his post. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, 1823-1886 Name of her book: A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Wife of James Chesnut, Jr., United States … that had seceded and fought as a group). She Early Years Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, on her grandparents’ plantation near Stateburg, South Carolina, in the High Hills of Santee. James Chesnut, Sr. was one of the wealthiest planters in the South, who owned 448 slaves and many large plantations. They like it as well as anything else. Though a daughter of a framer of the positive good position on slavery and wife to the son of one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina, Mary was against slavery. 1828, the Millers moved to the capital city of Columbia, returning to In her diary, Mary wrote historically valuable portraits of close friends such as Jefferson and Varina Davis, the Lees, Louis T. Wigfall, C. Clement Clay, the Prestons, Stephen R. Mallory, Robert M.T. the traditional male-dominated society of the South. Chesnut had begun attending a local school in Camden. The Chesnut fortune declined in the course of the war and thus, after his father died in 1866, Chesnut inherited little more than the extensive debts that encumbered the Mulberry and Sandy Hill plantations. She found Mulberry to be a stifling environment where it was difficult to indulge in these interests. The sensitivity of some issues Mary addressed in her diary – her opposition to slavery and her ideas about the place of women in a male dominated society – could be considered heretical. CHESNUT - Died August 16, 1918, Mary Frances, the little eight-month-old baby of Roscoe and Lula Chesnut. After the war Mary wrote three novels. She was a model woman of the aristocracy yet did not write on just the upper class society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. She also suffered from heart problems herself. 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