Katherine’s Reviews > Mary Chesnut's Civil War > Status Update

Had to take Mary back to the library :/

"We ought to be grateful that any one of us is alive. But nobody is afraid of their own negroes. These are brutes—savages, monsters—but I find everyone like myself, ready to trust their own yard. I would go down to the plantation tomorrow and stay there, if there was no white person in twenty miles." Absolutely astonishing the lengths these people'll go to reason "Surely the people I enslave won't murder ME."

"Patriarch Moses has cross-eyes. He looks both ways, seeing things from two points of view at once—makes him liberal-minded." The Explainer General thinks herself so funny...!

"Mr. Barnwell says democracies lead to untruthfulness. To always be electioneering is to be always false...He went on. "People dare not tell the truth in canvass. They must conciliate their constituents."" Well, he's not wrong.

"He coolly helped himself and ate my soldiers' peaches—as if peaches grew on trees here..." They must have a different kind of peach in South Carolina!

"...our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family resemble exactly 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."

"So many of these congressmen have been and are Methodist or Baptist preachers. A bad mixture of trades."

"One of the first things which depressed me was the kind of men put in office at this crisis...Young and active spirits ignored, places for worn-out politicians seemed the rule...In every state, as each election comes on, they resolutely put aside everything but the inefficient." Nothing ever seems to change!!!