Mary Chesnut's Civil War

by Mary Boykin Chesnut, C. Vann Woodward (Editor)

An authorized account of the Civil War, for which editor C. Vann Woodward won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for History, drawn from the diaries of a Southern aristocrat, records the disintegration and final destruction of the Confederacy.

Genres: History, Civil War, Nonfiction, Biography, American History, American Civil War, Memoir

886 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut

Reviews

[Phil Mullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend read this in the 80's, when it won a Pulitzer, but I began to want to read it when the 150th anniversary of the National Slaughtering caught my attention.

I found I liked Mary Chesnut quite a lot, even when she was saying something with which, as a matter of principle, I disagree. She was honest, apparently to a greater extent than most privileged slaveowners were able to be honest.

This struck me as a slaveowner's plausible state of mind:
<< November 28, 1863

Those old gray-haired darkies & their automatic noiseless perfection of training -- one does miss that sort of thing. Your own servants think for you, they know your ways & your wants; they save you all responsibility, even in matters of your own ease & well-doing. Eben the butler at Mulberry [her father-in-law's country house, he one of S. Carolina's wealthiest planters] would be miserable & feel himself a ridiculous failure, were I ever forced to ask him for anything. >> (page 488)

By March 5, 1865 things were falling apart for the Confederacy, & Mary was sharp in her judgments:
<< That lowering black future hangs there -- all the same. The end of the war brings no hope of peace or security to us. ... Yarn is our circulating medium. It is the current coin of the realm. At a factory here, Mrs. Glover traded off a negro woman for yarn. The woman wanted to go there as a factory hand, so it suited all round. I held up my hands! Mrs. Munro said: "Mrs. Glover knows she will be free in a few days. Besides, that's nothing. Yesterday a negro man was sold for a keg of nails." ... [The great slaveowners] will have no negroes now to lord it over. They can swell & peacock about & tyrannize now over only a small parcel of women & children -- those only who are their very own family. >> (page 747)

April 23, 1865: << And these negroes -- unchanged. The shining black mask they wear does not show a ripple of change -- sphinxes. Ellen [her slave] has had my diamonds to keep for a week or so. When the danger was over she handed them back to me, with as little apparent interest in the matter as if they were garden peas. >> (p. 794)

Mary Chesnut lived from 1823 to 1886, & wrote & re-wrote versions of her notes, hoping to relieve what had become fairly severe poverty. She read & spoke French fluently, & also read German.

I can't help but like her, & her first-person account of the Civil War (*her* Civil War, with all her complex feelings as it wound through its terrible years) is, despite its imperfect form, fascinating. It will (I hope!) keep me from being quite so doctrinal as I judge women & men who made do with the lives they (like everyone) had to endure.

[Elizabeth Jennings · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a native of South Carolina, I have had this on my "to read" list for several years. It was both painful to read and fascinating because it offers such an intimate look into the complex heritage of my home state.

For much of it, I was reminded of "The Masque of the Red Death" as this elite group of Confederate leadership focused on dinner parties with champagne, ice cream and roses, while horrific battles were taking place. Chesnut's snobbish tendencies were also hard to take at times--worst among these, to me, was making fun of misspellings in letters taken from dead Union soldiers. At the same time, she is insightful and self-aware and by the end I did have empathy for her and admiration for her tenacity.

The most interesting aspect of the memoir was reading about books and authors of the time and how they were received, as well as getting an intimate view of the complexity of the era. There was a lot more intermingling among Union and Confederate civilians than I imagined. There was also a lot more trust in the servants--at several points, Chesnut gives her valuables to her servants for safekeeping. And while there is a lot of brutality, I have to say that there is more humanity and reasonableness depicted from both sides than I expected, so in the end, reading it was almost an uplifting experience.

[booklady · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I haven't finished this book, 8 years ago I read over 390 pages worth and it's not light or easy reading. Mary Chestnut's Civil War is one woman's experience of the war between the states from the Southern perspective. I do agree with the adage that History is written one biography at a time. In any event, I think it can often best be understood that way. While watching the Ken Burn's series, "The Civil War", I noticed hearing Mary Chestnut quoted so frequently I wanted to read more of her. I wasn't disappointed with her journal. She's intelligent, well-educated, erudite and has a very broad grasp of the overall situation for having lived in one region of the country at a time in our nation's history when travel and communtion were extremely slow and limited.

On the down side, there are many footnotes, asides, digressions, etc., which are interesting and lend authenticity -- from a scholarly point -- but after a period of time make tough reading.

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Chestnut was the well-educated wife of a South Carolina gentleman-an attorney and former US senator who joined the confederacy and eventually rose to the rank of General in the CSA. Her perspective includes not just the vantage point of a member of the CSA hierarchy and their families, but also a working knowledge of many of the opponents with whom she had been well-acquainted while a dame in Washington circles in the years preceding the war.

For an American Civil War enthusiast who can appreciate the diary form; i.e., this book is not for everyone!...this is a fascinating, though albeit sometimes slow read. The stilted prose of the era and Mrs. Chestnut's penchant for frequent literary allusions and sprinkling of French phrases required rereading of passages throughout the length of the book. C. Vann Woodward did an admirable job of researching the people, events and publications mentioned, but the prodigious number of footnotes required also slowed the reading down. And I am that person who wants to glean every bit of information to better understand what I am reading, so I had to read every one! However, the insight into the war as viewed from a progressive mind of a woman well-placed in Southern society was too fascinating to make me abandon my mission and put it down.

Woodward includes a lengthy preface detailing Mary's life and times which proves extremely helpful in putting the diary into context.

Not a book for the faint of heart...but definitely an enlightening and fascinating read for a die-hard Civil War history buff.

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is rather difficult to get into in the first few hundred pages. While one is immediately taken with the breadth of Mary Chesnut's intelligence and wit, the war has not started in ernest so we are treated to a constant diet on the social life of the Southern aristocracy. It is interesting from a social history perspective but I bought the book for what I expected to be a commentary on the issues and the ongoing battles. That is not the focus of this book. That said, there is much to learn here. What is also clear from the beginning is the enormous dedication C. Vann Woodward had to his project.

My introduction to Woodward's work came way back in the late 70's when as an undergraduate in history I was assigned The Burden of Southern History. Since that time, my respect for his work has only grown. He was, in my mind, a giant in the study of the history of the South and richly deserved the Pulitzer he was awarded for editing this book.

Mary Chesnut has a perspective on her world that most women of the time would not have had. She was well educated and exceedingly well read. She had social position and a husband whose position in the Davis government gave her access to people and information unavailable to most mortals. Her husband, J.C., had resigned his seat in the U.S. Congress before secession. He was never a fire eater but supported Southern independence. It is difficult not to like and admire Mary. If she had been a man it seems likely that she would have achieved more than her husband who she seemed to find a bit timid when it came to self promotion. At one point, when pondering her husband's refusal to put himself forward to be an envoy to France, she exclaimed "I would love to go to France!" I believe in a more perfect world she would have been the envoy to France.

The book makes clear the toll the war took on the society of this class of Southerners. It is also clear how prevalent death was even outside of war. Life seemed to happen faster, people engaged and married more quickly, children came quickly (and women often died as a result). Life for Mary Chesnut, until she began moving around seemed like a constant party. The extravagant feasts enjoyed by those in her social class reveal a group of people enjoying themselves so much that they seem blind to the fact that they are doing it on the backs of a people who have been given no choice but to provide it for them.

Mrs. Chesnut made a great many revisions to her work and while that is common when writing any book, my common sense kept asking me why. She claimed to have always hated slavery (the slaves were her husbands) and yet it is she who seems to profit by their labor most. They dressed and undressed her, styled her hair, prepared her meals, cleaned her house, etc., etc.... She claims to have taught "her negroes" to read but no where in the book does she make mention of ever having done it on a particular day. Maybe she did teach them but are we to assume that they are all literate so she no longer does it? It is a bit suspicious to me. The reader is regularly reminded of how good she and her husband are to their "negroes". She relates a story of how, when traveling home in his carriage one day, her husband comes upon a black woman crying on the side of the road, beaten to a pulp on the verge of giving birth. He stopped and asked if he could do anything for her to which she replies: No my mistress has beat me again. Go ahead on your way. (paraphrased) And so he did. It struck me as strange that he would even need to ask the question. Would most people not have, if not carried her to safety or at least gotten someone else to do it?

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to any historian, teacher, or anyone with an interest in the CW or American history generally. I could not help but admire and like Mary. Given her circumstances, she handled herself admirably, as far as the reader could tell and tells a story that as far as I am aware, is unavailable elsewhere. This is a book I would have loved to have read in a group and discussed. There is so much in it that is rich and interesting; there are so many layers of complexity to this fascinating woman! I am sorry that I didn't read it a long time ago.

[Joe Crane · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you have an aunt who gossips about people you don't know and you find it fascinating, this book is for you. Otherwise, steer clear: which is sad. Mary Chestnut's husband was a high-ranking official in the Confederate government and she regularly ran into Jefferson Davis, Robert Lee and other well-known names of the Civil War. Although it was interesting seeing these names come up, this Diary's description of the events and personalities was banal and dry.

[Alexw · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF which is very rare for me-so borrrriiiingggg. Footnotes are longer than the narrative.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important Civil War resource in the form of her edited diaries. It is literary to a large degree. This version (annotated by historian C. Vann Woodward) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

I bought this book for the reference material and because it was featured and quoted extensively in the Ken Burns Civil War mini-series. There are some memorable quotes from the diary but it is mostly the vernacular of the time and the first hand witnesses that appealed to me.

It is also clear there was a great deal of delusion on the part of the Southern elite especially early in the war. Mary's sentiment feels very much like the MAGA party of today. Illogical and racist with a belief that willpower can overcome any obstacle. I will say that her 90 year old in-laws, who owned the Mulberry plantation outside Charleston which was the setting for most of the diary, were not so deluded. They believed what Lincoln said about unity and knew regardless of the outcome that there would be no survival for the South without the economic might of the North. So there is at least some honesty in the book although it was heavily edited by Mary Chestnut herself nearly twenty years after the fact in the 1880's.

4 stars

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've mentioned before having some conflicting issues with reading posthumously published diaries or journals, because I always get stuck on the point that the deceased may not have meant for their words to see the light of day... or, for that matter, the lights of many days. However, in this instance, Mary Chesnut knew exactly what she was doing.

She started the diary in 1861 and used it for the following four years, keeping abreast of the news of the day, specifically the beginning, the middle, and the end of the American Civil War. Twenty years later she revised it, and as she was childless, passed the diary on to a close friend, urging her to have it published after she died. She wanted the world to read her thoughts. Luckily her friend listened, or else we wouldn't have this perspective from a Confederate woman.

Married to a politician, Mary was privy to details about the war that not everyone (especially not every woman) at the time knew. She wrote about these encounters in extensive detail, as well as her opinions on the war, slavery, and society. She was also an avid reader, and included thoughts on the books she was reading - she was, for example, a huge fan of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and wrote about her first impression upon reading it, the paper it was written on, why she read it and loved it.

While I might not have agreed with all of her beliefs, occasionally there'd be a witty passage that would surprise me for feeling so modern. And then other times I'd be equally surprised for just how... dated her beliefs were.

Reading Mrs. Stowe or Redpath's John Brown, one feels utterly confounded at the atrocity of African slavery. We look upon the miserable black race as crushed to earth, habitually knocked down, as John Brown says, 'by an iron shovel or anything that comes handy.' At home we see them, the idlest, laziest, fattest, most comfortably contented peasantry that ever cumbered the earth and we forget there is any wrong in slavery at all.

I daresay the truth lies between the two extremes. - (p428)


Christian soldier, &c&c. There cannot be a Christian soldier. Kill or be killed, that is their trade, or they are a failure. Stonewall was a fanatic. The exact character we wanted was willing to raise the 'black flag'. He knew: to achieve our liberty, to win our battles, men must die. The religion of mercy, love your neighbor before yourself, prefer [WORD OMITTED?] in every act - why, that eliminates war and great captains. - (p501-02)


One woman so pretty, I had seen her before at her home in the South. They say her husband beats her. Here we said, let us look at a creature who stays with a man after a beating. - (p600)


That fearful hospital haunts me all day - worse at night. So much suffering, loathsome wounds, distortion, stumps of limbs exhibited to all and not half cured. - (p641)


Boozer, who is always on exhibition - walking, riding, driving - wherever a woman's face can go, there is Boozer. She is a beauty - that none can deny. They say she is a good girl. Then why does she not marry some decent man, among the shoals who follow her, and be off, out of this tangle while she has a shred of reputation left. - (p695)


Mrs. Johnston said she would never own slaves.

'I might say the same thing. I never would. Mr. Chesnut does, but he hates all slavery, especially African slavery.'

'What do you mean by African?'

'To distinguish that form from the inevitable slavery of the world. All married women, all children, and girls who live on in their father's houses are all slaves.' - (p729)

It doesn't really matter which side of the war you believe in, this is a fantastic account of an important period in American history, and is highly recommended. There are moments that drag when it seems Mary is busy name-dropping or carrying on about things I personally find less than interesting, but still a rare record from an even rarer perspective. It's easy to forget that women had much of a role in the late 19th century since most of the history books involve men, or were written by men. But the women were there, and some of them even wrote about it. Some of them (gasp) even had thoughts of their own. Mary Chesnut is a great example of that.

[Janisse Ray]

I'm not going to rate this book. I can't rate it highly for literary value and I don't want to be associated with most of its values. I've been reading this thick book for 2 years, a few pages at a time. I was assigned to read it in a Civil War history course that I took at Hollins, when I was there as a writer-in-residence. I have also been reading slave narratives and history books about the war, trying to understand what happened. This is the journal of a wealthy white Southern woman whose husband was an officer in the Confederacy. I learned a lot here about the bon-vivant lifestyle of most wealthy Southerners. They were incredibly social. They traveled a lot to spend time in each other's company. For the first three years of the war, the partying did not stop. Even things like truffles were being served at dinner parties. But by the Sherman got to Georgia, their lifestyles had dramatically changed. Sometimes Mary Chestnut did not have enough to eat and depended for a while on others to bring food to her. I was especially interested in relationships between enslaved people and slave holders, and I wanted better to understand how the war unfolded. What surprised me about the book was Mary Chestnut's feminist values. She was careful to try to be the woman society wanted her to be -- frail, pretty, quiet, sexy but not too sexy -- but truly she bristled at this. I loved reading about those moments in the book, and I could see very clearly the fundamentals of the women's movement. Mary Chestnut loathed boring people; she was happiest, if she were ever happy at all, among interesting, well-educated, well-read people. I liked that about her. Although I can not support her stand on slavery, I found her an intriguing person, and from her notes I learned a lot about the underside of the Civil War from an owning-class perspective.

[Tom Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a painfully slow reader. I read words like I chew meat - with care. This book is a slow, enigmatic and tedious read. A real slog over forty miles of bad road. That is not to say the book was a worthless read. On the contrary, our man C. Vann Woodward did yeoman's work in editing the thousands of pages of handwritten manuscripts, diaries, journals, and rewrites for possible publication, etc., etc... Mary offers her first hand observations of the Civil War - from within the milieu of the chosen few. For our Mary was of the crème de la crème of Southern Society. That those observations include rank rumor and the popular apocryphal stories of the day just adds a bit of flavoring. The most accurate reporting involved the endless weddings and banal courtships of plantation white folk. People who had for far too long lived as though they were all that mattered in creation. Insular in their favored status, well read, well mannered to each other, aloof, pious, etc., etc. (Our Mary is addicted to the etc., etc., yada, yada of life, read the book and you shall see) Read this book after reading, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist" lest you be taken in by our Mary's endless kvetching about the lazy and dirty slaves. I should give the book a 3 for it does have historical value in fleshing out a world that crashed and burned at the end of the Civil War. It all came back, of course. Jim Crow saw to that. And here we are today with a brand-new, throwback of a white supremacist president. I chose this book as the only book I could possibly read given the catastrophic results of the 2016 pestilential election. The poor southern ladies at home alone - with their menfolk gone to war - the ladies left to fear the Yankees in their front and the Negroes in their rear. Stressful for them, I have no doubt of that. My two-star rating reflects my poor attitude, for to my utter amazement 63,000,000 of my fellow citizens thought that a carny-barker, flim-flam of a "business-man" would make a perfectly fine president. The decision the South made in attacking Fort Sumter was almost as intelligent. Given 836 pages of text there were some serious moments such as the murder of Betsy Witherspoon. But what of all those white on white murders? Surely those murders were as heinous? The South was a patriarchy and that chafed the sensibilities of MBC. I should imagine many a good southern wife was beaten to death by her God-ordained master, her husband. 90% Of the footnotes were of no interest, though on page 232: "In 1844, the governor of Mass. sent Samuel Hoar, a former congressman, to Charleston to challenge the constitutionality of state laws requiring black sailors on ships in S.C. ports to be imprisoned and, if they were unable to pay their jail fees, to be sold into slavery." Nasty bit of history, that. Mary's daily entries are often so cryptic that her writing becomes unintelligible. But I paid it no mind and sailed on through her turgid seas. On several occasions she related the common southern refrain, "We will never give it up - no never!", and so they haven't. A couple choice quotes from the book, "no plummet can sound the depths" and "life seems a senseless repetition of the same blunders." These are from the last chapters of the book and are exactly as they sound.

[Margaret Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the first paragraph of the Second Epilogue of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy writes:

History is the life of nations and humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.

When his novel was published in Russia in 1869, Tolstoy did not know that Mary Chestnut of South Carolina had come exquisitely close to achieving just such an "impossible direct description" in the personal journal she had kept between 1861 and 1865. Her compelling creation of story was accomplished by recording dialogue, by which I mean quoting from conversations she had with her friends, family, and servants, all enhanced by her personal commentary, often with analogies from the books she voraciously read. By such means, she filled her pages with a powerful story of daily life in the Southern states during the American Civil War.

Because her husband was a political aid to Jefferson Davis, later an appointed military officer, Mrs. Chestnut observed the experience as an ultimate insider. She moved with him between hotel rooms and boarding houses in Montgomery, Alabama; Charleston, Camden, and Columbia, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; several smaller western North Carolina towns; and, when the formal military operations were over, back over roads through burned destruction to Camden and the partially destroyed Chestnut plantation of Mulberry.

Mrs. Chestnut was a listener. She simply wrote down what other people said. And what she herself said—or thought, without saying aloud. She was witness to the political disunion and the making of war. That appears to be the reason for her journal. She was studying the story as it unfolded, unable to see the end until it occurred. Was she searching for reasoning in the chatter among her friends? The gossip concerned flirtations and romances of the young. There were weddings to attend as well as funerals. A social whirl filled the civilian world, even after brides' dresses had to be fashioned from homespun because finer fabrics could not be found at any price, and at any rate Confederate money ceased to be accepted as currency.

Her seeming attempt at honesty lends the quality to her writing. She does not neglect reporting a few murders of plantation owners by their slaves, and she fears what the future will bring for all of the people of the South. From the earliest pages Mrs. Chestnut acknowledges her recognition that the custom of slavery is wrong and is inevitably ending, despite her resentment of "those Yankees bullying the South." A reader may be surprised to note how much animosity was apparently felt by many South Carolina aristocrats against Jefferson Davis and the other political civilians who run the war from a safe haven as a whole generation of young men are sent to the physical battles to die of either horrific wounds or terrible infectious diseases. Civilians criticize the generals, and generals criticize each other.

Emotions stay raw throughout as they evolve from dismay, anger, indignation, misgivings, skepticism and uneasiness to confusion, fear, sorrow, despair, regret, agony, heartache and sadness. In the end, the poignancy and power of this long diary is that Mary Chestnut wrote, probably unwittingly, a version of universal truth about human fallibility.

[Eric Byrd]

This monster diary might end up like Isherwood's, as something I nibble at before bed when I don't feel like reading anything else, or it might be an absorbing joy I plow through in a few weeks. All signs point to the latter. Skimming Chesnut, I feel the era opening up, as when Catton, in another prospective browse (of Mr. Lincoln's Army), discusses the variety of coughs and throat-clearings with which marching Union troops would signal the wayside apparition of pretty farm girls to the rest of the column. Chesnut's a heavyweight. A fierce Confederate partisan and planter's wife whose identity as a writer and intellectual transcends, makes mysteriously prismatic, those social identities. "You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor." "God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and an iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad—this only I see. Like the patriarchs of old our 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."

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally gave up on this, not because it isn't interesting, but because the choppiness drove me crazy. it would be a wonderful book for historical research but I just couldn't flow with the constant footnotes and interjections. That's a problem with me and reason for reading it, not with the researchers who did a masterful job in putting pieces of diaries together.

[E B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite long and the author entries often exceed a few pages. It's certainly not a casual book to read, but is filled with a tremendous amount of insight into the daily lives of those at home during the Civil War within the south. The author was extremely well connected, which gives some input not otherwise found in journals. Its a rare view as much of the journal and letters are from soldiers on the front-line.

[Tim Stafford · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's long, and often hard to follow, but this is a classic of Civil War history. Chesnut was married to one of Jeff Davis's closest aides, who later became an army general for the confederacy. She knew everybody and kept notes in a gossipy, humorous style. A lot of ink is expended on the young beauties she observes, with their flirtings, courtings, engagements and marriages. There's also a lot of attention to sumptuous dinners and parties. The juxtaposition of war's carnage--she knew plenty of men who died--and the social whirl is stunning. Chesnut despised slavery, she says, but lived a slaveholder's luxury. She fiercely supported the confederate rebellion, principally because the South "had a right" to divorce themselves from the Union. Occasionally she wonders whether it justifies all the death and suffering.

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a great reference book but not a good straight read as it's just a pure journal.

[Bill Tress · Rating 3 out of 5]

My local library has a for-sale table of used books that groans under the weight of the usual suspects. Yet today, I saw a large book enclosed in plastic, appearing to have been never read! On close examination, I saw that it had won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1982. Why hadn’t this book ever had its plastic wrapping removed or even read? The original cost was $44.00 so somebody spent a lot of money in the purchase of this book. This mystery is surely a case for Miss Marple. I suspect that the eight hundred plus pages was a part of the reason the plastic wrap was never removed, although it’s possible the purchaser died before they had the chance to read it! For a $1 I could not lose, so I am now the proud owner of this historic classic.
C. Vann Woodward has edited the book. The introduction alone was worth my one-dollar investment. Woodward set the stage for the body of this book by a rich and sophisticated rendering of what the reader can expect from the contents.
Mary Chestnut is a woman born into the rich and privileged traditions of the South. She had a good education and she possessed intellect, insight, and intuition. She had enlightened views on slavery and the female role in society and this was unusual for the period in which she lived in. Mary began keeping a daily diary in 1861. She expressed her thoughts about people, politics, and life in general in this secret diary kept until 1864 when the Civil war ended.
Her husband was an influential land and slave owner, they owned hundreds of acres of farmland in South Carolina. He was also a politician who was always close to the most influential people in National and Confederate politics. Because of his status, they were prominent members of South Carolina society. This position gave Mary a front row seat to view the drama experienced in the South after it seceded from the Union.
Mary aspired to be a writer, and in addition to her faithfully maintained diary she authored novels and short stories, but with little commercial success. In 1880, she decided to convert her diary into a book which resulted in a Pulitzer Prize in history.
Her daily thoughts on a variety of subjects comprise the 800 + pages of the book. This book is too big to be read in one or even numerous sittings. This reader has a plan to slowly progress through her views by setting it aside and periodically returning to it. This approach works because the book is divided into her daily writing, and therefore, I have fresh reading material each time I pick up the book.
After the excellent introduction, the odyssey begins on February 18, 1861. It is immediately discernable that Mary Chestnut is a wise and keen observer of humanity and events. Her entries are humorous, insightful and the exude sophistication bought with an excellent education and a study of classic literature. She had enough knowledge of Greek literature and nineteenth Century writers to quote them in her daily musings, at times confusing the reader, thank God for the footnotes! The daily entries share the frustration, fear, sorrow, and anger that the war brought. While the diary is filled with interesting observations, this reviewer was puzzled by how her entries coincided with actual battles. She records the losses incurred by family and friends, yet I am hard pressed to connect the losses to a particular battle.
On April 7, 1861. She and her husband are in Charleston, SC and it looks like war is imminent; she cries for the South! Unlike others she has the foresight to know what is coming. She states on this day, “we have the North in front of us and the negro behind us.” This is an interesting observation! As slave holders they watch for a reaction from their slaves. Mary says, “things go on as usual, yet I am suspicious of their thoughts.” She is further quoted “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants.” “They carry it too far! You could not tell that they hear, even the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dining in their ear’s night and day; And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign, are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are silent and strong and biding their time?” Throughout this diary she shares her fear of the Black slave. An aged plantation owner, Mrs. Witherspoon was killed in her bed by her slaves and this story and the fears it aroused permeate this diary.
She writes that her prayers are for Lincoln and Seward to pull back from the brink and she hopes for a Statesmen to find a solution even if it is temporary.
What is clear even in the initial stages of this book is that we are not reading history, we are living it through the eyes of a person who was its witness! This is an ingredient that makes this book special.
Mr. Chestnut is in the Charleston harbor; he is one of a few charged with negotiating the surrender of Fort Sumter. He talks to Major Robert Anderson who commands the US Army garrison at Fort Sumter. Anderson tells Chestnut that he sees no value to defending this fort isolated in Charleston Harbor, but Lincoln insists and is sending supplies; He cannot surrender! Anderson’s words and thoughts are transitioned from husband to wife and then into the diary.
The house that Mr. and Mrs. Chestnut have in Charleston is a gathering place for the who’s who of Southern society! Chestnut is on Jefferson Davis’s staff, his position and intimacy with Jefferson Davis makes his home the center of news and rumor. Mary says that her home and the city are crazy with emotion, prayer, tears, confusion, and bravado, and She is in the middle of it.
The city is awakened by the guns firing from the Fort and the shore batteries firing back. She tells us that the sound is so loud it makes it impossible to hear anything else. People are in the streets and on roof tops watching the action; she hopes her husband is safe! At a gathering at her home, she hears naval officers discussing the idea of putting some cannons on a barge and moving the barge around the harbor to fire at the Fort. I have read the history of this battle, but this idea of cannon on a barge was new to me and remarkably interesting!
April 15, 1861, the Fort surrenders, nobody hurt, after all the cannon fire. Mary writes that she and others still pray that Mr. Lincoln can find a bloodless solution to avoid a war. I found this interesting that she and others look North and at Mr. Lincoln for a solution.
On July 22, 1861, Mrs. Davis comes by the house and told Mary that a great battle has been fought at a place called Bull Run (in her diary, Mary refers to it as Bulls Run). Many of the people she knew were involved and Mary is stunned! Dead and dying cover the field. Shermans battery taken, Lynchburg regiment cut to pieces, three hundred of the Legion wounded. These women were in constant fear of losing family and friends, so many tears!
On the 24th, Mr. Chestnut came home, he gave her an account of the battle. I was interested in two points that Mary noted. The first observation was that everyone was claiming credit for the victory, and she saw this as a false euphoria, she understood that “success has many fathers while failure is usually an orphan,” but she saw too much of a cock of the walk attitude. And she did not like it!
Of more interest to me was what Mary said to Mr. Chestnut, why hadn’t the army followed up on the victory and gone into Washington? Her observation is the key to any discussion of the first battle at Bull Run. Washington was open! It was defenseless and the Confederate army was within a few miles of the City. It is possible that the war could have been ended by the South’s entry into the Capital City of the North. Some commentators stated that the Southern Army could have walked into Washington for a week after the battle of Bull Run, a terrific opportunity lost. Mary, without a military background and just applying common sense, clearly observed this missed opportunity.
We continue reading her daily diary entries, and sometimes it is difficult to separate the “chaff from the wheat,” at times, it is just female chatter and gossip but sometimes there is a pearl. In one entry, she talked of Nelson at Trafalgar while mortally wounded wrote a codicil to his will. In it he asked that his mistress Emma Hamilton be given a pension by the Crown. The King ignored his request and never gave any money to Hamilton. Britain even to this day celebrates Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, yet his one request was ignored. These snippets of History, gained from casual observations by Mary are the reason I enjoy reading history; you find facts, comments, and observations in the strangest places! She is well grounded in European history and culture; it is proof that she is a prolific reader.
The politicians in the South are as bad as those in the Congress of the United States. Mary records the bitter feelings, back biting, and actual subversion regarding Jefferson Davis. Many southern politicians hate Davis and do what they can to obstruct his every move. Certainly not the “loyal opposition,” but typical of politicians. A surprise to this reader was the hostility that surfaced regarding Davis’s decision to making Lee the General in charge! Many wanted Joe Johnson in charge and when Johnson was relegated to the western frontier, there was a cry of outrage, again politics. Mary’s observation was “we have enough enemies; we don’t need to fight ourselves.”
There is so much of interest in this book that it is difficult to just focus on the primary topics. For instance, Stone Wall Jackson must be center stage in any discussion of the Civil War and this book provided many varying views on Jackson. After Jackson’s death, and Lee’s comment that the loss of Jackson was in effect like cutting off his right arm, the South had few victories.
Mary observed That general Lawton was here last night, and he was Stonewall’s general, “so I listened
With all my ears.”
Lawton tells his story; “Stonewall could not sleep. So, every two or three nights you were waked up by orders to have your brigade in marching order before daylight and report in person to the commander. Then you were marched a few miles out and then a few miles in again.” “A little different from the western stories – and some generals nearer Richmond asleep several hours after the had been expected to attack the day of a battle.” Mary’s recorded comment was “The restless. Discontented spirits move the world – unsatisfied, I mean.” Lawton finished by saying “All this was to make us always ready, ever on the alert. And the end of it was this, Jackson’s men had gone half a day’s march before Peter Longstreet waked and breakfasted”
Lawton continued, “Jackson had no sympathy with human infirmity. He was a one-idea’d man. He looked upon broken-down men and stragglers as the same thing. Hence, while he was alive, there was much fudge in the talk of his soldiers’ love for him, their sympathy with him. They feared him and obeyed him to the death. Faith, they had in him stronger than death. I doubt if he had their love. Their respect he commanded. “And now that they begin to see a few years more of Stonewall Jackson would have freed us from the yoke of the hateful Yankees, they deify him They are so proud to have been one of the famous Stonewall brigade”
I find Jackson to be a fascinating character. At VMI, he was not a great teacher. He gave rote lectures and accepted few if any questions. That is also how he performed as a general. He did not take his subordinates into his confidence. He would give a direct order and then he would walk away. Some say, he was insane! Yet, nobody questions his results.
I remember the narrative of his end run at Chancellorsville from a previous book, Stonewall Jackson, by James Robertson, Jr. He began at 10 o’clock at night, he turned his army around 360 degrees in the dark of night then he raced ten miles around an unexpecting enemy. His army started a begrudging move but slowly the men began to sense that “Old Jack” was up to something, and they were going to part of it. They started to move faster, eventually they were running over an unprecedented ten-mile nighttime flanking movement, all the while, Old Jack rode up and down the line encouraging them and cheering them on. That morning they smashed into an unsuspecting Union force driving it back in a rout and assuring a Southern victory.” Is this the ravings of an insane man? Or a genius for war!
Mary makes a comment about the Hampton Roads Conference, and I don’t know what she meant, so again I go to the internet and find another pearl. The Hampton Roads Conference was a peace conference held between the United States and representatives of the unrecognized breakaway Confederate States on February 3, 1865, aboard the steamboat River Queen in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to discuss terms to end the American Civil War. The topics discussed were the abolishment of slavery, compensation for this loss of property and the exchange of prisoners. This conference failed because Lincoln would not allow the South its independence.
Mary Chestnuts diary entries begin to acknowledge inevitable defeat. On December 1, 1864, Mr. Chestnut now a General wrote to her, “At Choctawhatchee, Yankee landing in great force. Our troops down there are raw militia—old men and boys never under fire before. Some college cadets – in all a mere handful. “The cradle and the graves are robbed by us, they say.” Her diary entries illustrate that the noncombatant woman of the Confederacy suffer, they receive the daily news of the loss of sons, grandson, husbands, and friends, they know it is over!
In a tragic entry, dated November 6, 1864, she said, I know nothing in history more touching than Wade Hampton’s situation at the supremist moment of his misery – when he sent one son to save the other and saw them both fall. The diary entries at this point mourn the losses that are ever increasing.
By March 1865, Mary knows she must leave Columbia. Accompanied by one slave she travels to North Carolina where she gets a room at a boarding house. Her diary illustrates how her standard of living goes downhill quite quickly. She has few belongings; some confederate money and she talks of hunger and a cold and wet existence. The reader notices a change in the relationship with her one slave. She is quite dependent on her now, and the slave has a more dominate role in her life.
Several of her friends from Columbia have arrived in this safe place. These women make do by supporting each other, sharing food and even clothing. Mary points out that there are several “generals without armies” about and they pass their time by discussing strategy among themselves, this is a sad portrait of once proud men.
They all talk about Sherman’s advance across the South, and they fear him and hope he does not threaten them. Yet, what is feared the most are the stragglers and deserters that follow the armies. These men are jackals, hyena’s, predators who steal, kill and rape. Mary discusses some of the tragic incidents of females isolated and left to their own devises who face humiliating degradation and death at the hands of these animals. This is the side of war that history tends to ignore, the battles and exploits of great warriors are highlighted while hidden is the unbridled savagery unleashed on the most vulnerable civilians, namely old men, woman, and children. One gets the feeling that the Malingerers and opportunist that follow an army should be shot on sight. The topic is not mentioned in this book, yet, The Ku Klux Klan was formed for just this reason, to protect the most vulnerable southern population from the carpet baggers and Jackals that roamed the land after the wars end.
On April 19, 1865, she records: “General Lee has capitulated” “Now we belong to negroes and Yankees”.
On April 22, 1865, she writes, “Lincoln – Old Abe Lincoln – killed – murdered” “See if they don’t take vengeance on us, now that we are ruined and cannot repel them any longer.”
The end has come for Mary’s diary. Mary along with family and friends are now hostages. They sit quietly awaiting their fate at the hands of the Union army, carpetbaggers and jackals who scrutinize everywhere in search of anything of value.
This book at times is just the trite observations of a woman in emotional turmoil, but it also is a clear picture of what war is really like for the vulnerable citizens who get caught up in its wake.

[Scotty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Pulitzer winner for history is understandable. It is the dairy of Mary Chestnut, during the Civil War. Because it is a transcript of her journal entries, it is fairly a quick read of 800+ pages. Mary Chestnut was a Southern belle, married to a Confederate, who apposed slavery. She had an incredibly sharp mind and quick wit and a spot-on observer. Woodward's amount of research in footnotes is astonishing. Another particular interest is Chestnut's viewpoints of her family's slaves (and others) all throughout her diary. From the top of society to practically begging for food after the war, Chestnut's account of the Civil War is like none other. Having read many Civil War books, I suggest this one to be read purely on the viewpoint of a ground-level observer.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, a word about this edition of Chesnut's "Diary." She never finished working on the thing, and there were a couple of editions that were published from a single version of the manuscript, without reference to the volumes of the original journal that have survived. This edition includes material from the journals that Chesnut cut (often to hide the identity of the people involved, or to clean up somebody's image), specially marked. It has useful footnotes, especially where she uses pseudonyms or nicknames; and to reference books and poems she refers to or quotes unclearly. Also, an important touch, it omits sections that no longer make any sense. (It's clear she was sometimes interrupted in her writing, and didn't finish a thought; and sometimes the vagueness of an anecdote simply mystifies the reader.)

This is an unparalleled look at civilian life in the South during the Civil War, by someone in a privileged observational position. It's the Confederate equivalent to the Diaries of George Templeton Strong. Mary Chesnut was the wife of a former US Senator from SC; a personal friend of Jefferson Davis and his wife; a friend of numerous generals, including John Bell Hood, Wade Hampton, Z. C. Deas, Louis T. Wigfall, and her own husband who was a brigadier of SC militia. She knew several Southern governors. She was in Charleston for the shelling of Sumter (her husband was a go-between to the Fort), in Montgomery for the founding of the Confederacy, in Richmond for much of the war, and in Sherman's path when he scourged the Carolinas.

She hated slavery, but depended on slaves. She utterly hated the divisiveness that arose in the Confederacy from the very beginning, and she catalogs it endlessly. Those folks just couldn't stop seceding. She blows hot and cold on many issues, and records the changes of mood. And she becomes a refugee at the end, fleeing the Yankee armies. (I recently read A Woman in Berlin, and this work had several similarities.)

So despite being scattershot and unstructured, as a real diary would be, this is definitely a five-star historical document. She is scathing, sympathetic, bull-headed and detailed. It's an interesting mix.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll be honest, this was a bit of a slog. Mary Chesnut was the wife of a relatively high-ranking official in the Confederacy from South Carolina. She provides some really interesting perspectives on the war, government, slavery, and the role of women in her society. The most interesting parts of the book as a story occur at the beginning, when Fort Sumter is under attack and no one's sure what's going to happen, and toward the end, when she was forced to flee from her house because of Sherman's army. However, in between there's a lot of details of her social circle and calendar that I didn't find all that interesting. In particular there is a dizzying array of names and nicknames and while I got used to some of them it's not always easy to discern who she means. While the editor does a good job of annotating most of the names the first time and providing an index, there are just a lot of people to keep track of.

The textual history of the book is rather interesting. While it's presented as a diary, the editor makes it clear that the author rewrote it at least twice and apparently never settled on an adequate format for publication before she died. The edition that is presented was re-written in the 1880s. The 1905 published by a family friend was apparently substantially abridged. In contrast, this is a mostly complete edition of her final version. The editor selects passages from the earlier rewriting where he thinks they have something interesting to contribute. In most cases it seems like the earlier passages he chooses express more blunt and/or personal opinions of the events being reported.

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have delayed writing a review because I had so much to say about it, but have decided to get it done. I would have loved to have known this woman ... she was so well educated and so challenged by the circumstances of the war. She had a wicked sense of humor. I had so many post-its on so many pages and my review would have been SO lengthy. There are many, many notes and you will want to read about half of them. A frequent note by the editor was about quotations used by Mary in her journals or diaries which were slightly different from the original which only says to me that she (1) changed it on purpose to make a point or be humorous or (2) wrote it as she remembered it - in other words, she wasn't pulling out books and writing down the quotations, which means she had in her memory many, many interesting quotations. Definitely a good read.

[Donna Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this tome HARD COVER, thinking it was a real find! A primary source! A journal from someone who lived through it all! My book club reviewed it in glowing terms.

And it came. And I zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh I AM sorry. It's just that the way she wrote was soooooooozzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

No more. I promise. I WILL stay awake. But in order to do so, I have to abandon Ms. Chesnut. I still have her on my Civil War shelves, in the hope that some day, I'll go downstairs and open that book and the dawn will break with a whole angel chorus singing Hallelujah. If it happens, you folks will be the first to know.

Keeping it as a reference tool. You just never know....

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mary Chestnut's war-time diaries have been published in various edited versions. In the 1980s, C. Vann Woodward was the first editor to attempt to publish her diaries unabridged and annotated. He carefully indicates which portions had been published before and which portions he "saved" from obscurity. In my opinion, the diaries only benefited from editing. At just under 900 pages, the unedited version contains so much disconnected material that the reading is very slow and hard going.

[Kara Thorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won't say how long it took me to finish this, but in the end it was worth it. Taking it with a healthy grain of salt (as I do all autobiographies), it portrays a view of life during the Civil War and the hardships faced by those left at home. It is an excellent, if long, historical text that will give you more than just dry facts and boring recitations. You get to see how war affected day-to-day living.

[Jane Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting reading. Mary Chesnut knew everyone who was anyone and knew all the inside stories. It could get somewhat repetitious as she visited friends and exchanged gossip. Her views on slavery were interesting, as she proclaimed herself to be antislavery, but her feelings were hurt if her slaves didn't stay completely loyal to her during the war, and she admitted she didn't like to do the work around the house and was glad she didn't have to.

Very good for the flavor of the war years.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

C. Vann Woodward really deserved his Pulitzer
for this masterful weaving together of Chesnut's many different versions of this diary.
It was a hard read, but rewarding, offering in it's sheer volume of daily detail a better feel for life behind the lines than many a more polished
and abbreviated narrative.

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This diary first came to my attention during Ken Burns Civil War documentary. Historian Shelby Foote who provided much of the narrative often read quotes and observations on the war from her diary. It is a rich work that provides a woman's perspective on war.

[Bev]

Much more interesting to read what someone thought at the time than what historians think today.

[Clinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had wanted to read this for a long time because it appeared in the bibliography of virtually every book about the Civil War that I read. Mary Chestnut (MBC) was very well connected with the CSA government. Her husband was on the military staff of Jefferson Davis and the Chestnuts and Davises were personal friends. As such, she was privy to the facts and gossip of high level discussions.

This project began as a series of journals that MBC kept during the war years. After the war, she thought to publish them as a money-making enterprise, since the war left her family impoverished. To ready her rough journals for publication, she edited and rewrote them three times, but died before finishing the third version. The editor collected all of the four original manuscripts and created a single version combining the manuscripts, restoring sections deleted by MBC in later versions and deleting irrelevant or nonsensical passages. The result gives a somewhat fascinating look into upper class society of the American south during the war.

During the early parts of the war, the almost daily social gatherings continued unabated, but gradually petered out, especially in those parts of the country most affected by the war. What I found most surprising was the revelation that many in the south were opposed to slavery and knew that the south had no chance of winning the Civil War. Yet, they continued to support the war effort, knowing it would all come to no good purpose (from their perspective). Also interesting are the interactions between white slaveholders and their slaves. MBC readily acknowledges that she has no clue about what the slaves think about specific news or their condition. She notices no changes in them as emancipation nears. Despite all of the great insight, I awarded the book only 3 stars because it is filled with gossip about friends, relatives, other acquaintances and their various romances. Although MBC found these interesting topics, I wished that there had been more information about the changes to society and the economy as the war progressed. MBC and her husband ended the war penniless, accepting the charity of friends and family to survive. The story of her decreasing fortunes is largely untold.

As a prime reference source for Civil War historians, this is a worthwhile read for dedicated Civil War buffs. Those with a casual interest will probably want to pass on it.