Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary on February 18, 1861, and ended it on June 26, 1865. She was an eyewitness to many historic events as she accompanied her husband to significant sites of the Civil War. Among them were Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia, where the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America convened; Charleston, where she was among witnesses of the first shots of the Civil War; Columbia, South Carolina, where her husband served as the Chief of the Department of the Military of South Carolina and brigadier general in command of South Carolina reserve forces; and again Richmond, where her husband served as an aide to the president. At times they also lived with her parents-in-law in a house called Mulberry Plantation near Camden. While it was relatively isolated in thousands of acres of plantation and woodland, they entertained many visitors.
The diary was filled with the cycle of changing fortunes during the Civil War. Although she edited it during the 1870s and 1880s for publication, she retained the sense of events unfolding without foreknowledge. She was very politically aware, and analyzed the changing fortunes of the South and its various classes through the years. She also portrayed southern society and the mixed roles of men and women. She was forthright about complex and fraught situations related to slavery, particularly the abuses of sexuality and power. For instance, Chesnut confronted the problem of white men fathering children with enslaved women in their own extended households.
Chesnut explicitly worked to create literature; she described people in penetrating and enlivening terms. Literary scholars have called the Chesnut diary the most important work by a Confederate author. Chesnut captured the growing difficulties of all classes of the Confederacy.
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. Later versions have retained more of her original work, and have been annotated to fully identify the large cast of characters.
Publication history
- 1949: An expanded edition, edited by Ben Ames Williams and annotated to identify the people and places
- 1981: A new edition entitled Mary Chesnut's Civil War, edited by historian C. Vann Woodward