Mary Boykin Chesnut

A Biography

Elisabeth S. Muhlenfeld

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1992
• Print ISBN:
  9780807118047
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807152553
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

"In her admirable biography of Mary Chesnut, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has American literature as well as American history in her debt." -- C. Vann Woodward
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823--1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. A Diary from Dixie (republished in 1981 as Mary Chesnut's Civil War)is far more than a simple diary, however, for Mrs. Chesnut's drawing room was a social center for many of the most prominent political and military figures in the Confederacy. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilizes Mrs. Chesnut's autobiographical writings, her papers, and those of her family, as well as published sources. It traces her life in South Carolina from her childhood, as the daughter of a governor and United States senator, through her schooling and her marriage to James Chesnut, Jr., the son of a wealthy South Carolina planter. During the war her husband served as an aide to P. G. T. Beauregard and to Jefferson Davis, achieving the rank of general.
Muhlenfeld emphasizes Mary Chesnut's last twenty years, when she helped her family through the intricacies of repaying immense debts incurred during the Civil War, rebuilding wrecked homes, and reestablishing some measure of order and security. These were also the years of her serious writing. She experimented with fiction, writing three novels and translating others from the French; and in 1881 she began the last revisions of her Civil War journal. In the descriptive passages, characterizations, thematic patterns, and overall structure of the revised journal, Chesnut employed the techniques she had learned by writing fiction.
Besides adding to our knowledge of this unusual nineteenth-century southern woman, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography enhances our knowledge of the history of women in general as it delineates the transformation of a wartime diary into the chronicle that remains a major document in southern history.

Notes

QUOTATIONS FROM LETTERS, diaries and other nineteenth-century holograph manuscripts are transcribed exactly, and readers should make allowance for the vagaries that creep into any handwritten documents. A glance at the sample journal pages among the illustrations will give readers an idea of the eccentricities of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s hand. To adapt the hand to the printed page, superscript letters have been lowered and underlined words have been italicized. Inadvertent repetitions (when, for example, a “the” at the end of one line is repeated at the beginning of the next) have been silently omitted. Bracketed insertions are mine.

ONE

1 Mary Boykin Chesnut’s original Civil War journal, dated May 18, 1861, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, hereinafter cited as “Journal,” followed by date of entry. Mary Boykin Chesnut will hereinafter be cited as MBC. A full transcript of the surviving portions of her original Civil War journal, edited by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld and Thomas E. Dasher, is available at South Caroliniana Library, the Library of Congress, and Yale University Library.

2 Ibid.

3 MBC’s revised Civil War journal, written between 1881 and 1884 (see Chap. Eight herein), entry dated December 12, 1864, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, hereinafter cited as “revised journal,” followed by date of entry.

4 Isabella Donaldson Martin, June 21, 1839-March 4, 1913, was the daughter of the Reverend William Martin and Margaret Maxwell. Information on Miss Martin is scant. Her obituary in the Columbia State, March 6, 1913, p. 16, provides the best biographical sketch about her. Archie Vernon Huff’s Tried by Fire: Washington Street United Methodist Church, Columbia, S.C. (Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1975) offers isolated anecdotes about her church activities as an elderly woman. The Martin Papers in the South Caroliniana Library contain little information about Isabella. See affidavit, July 14, 1940, in Myrta Lockett Avary Papers, Atlanta Historical Society. Most of the information I have provided about the first publication of MBC’s revised Civil War journal has been drawn from the Avary Papers, which include various letters and copies of letters to and from Miss Martin, Mrs. Avary, and several editors at D. Appleton and Company, publishers of the first edition of A Diary From Dixie.

5 Isabella Martin to Mrs. Avary, October 22, 1904, in Avary Papers. The letter states that Miss Martin had had the journals for “over ten years.”

6 Isabella Martin to Francis W. Dawson, July 23, 1887, in Dawson Papers, Duke University Library, Durham, N.C. The letter states, “There is so much however that is personal in the journal that I could not allow it to go into any one’s hands but my own and it will be entirely re-written.” Miss Martin had apparently not yet taken possession of the journals when she wrote to Dawson, the year after MBC’s death, but had almost certainly read many parts of them on her visits to Camden. Miss Martin told Mrs. Avary she was “on the eve” of burning the journals, “in despair at publishers’ indifférence,” when Mrs. Avary “found” them. Affidavit, July 14, 1940, in Avary Papers.

7 [Isabella D. Martin], “Sketch of Mrs. [Louisa S.] McCord, by Miss I. D. Martin” in [Louisa McCord Smythe (comp.)], For Old Lang Syne: Collected for My Children (Columbia, S.C.: [Lucas and Richardson], 1900), 13–16; Mrs. Thomas Taylor et al. (eds.), South Carolina Women in the Confederacy (Columbia: State Co., 1903); Mrs. Avary, the daughter of Howard Alexander Lockett and Augusta Harper, wrote A Viriginia Girl in the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton, 1903).

8 Five long excerpts from the book appeared in Saturday Evening Post on January 28, February 4, 11, 18, 25, 1905. A Diary From Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of fames Chesnut, fr., United States Senator from South Carolina, 1859–1861, and afterward an Aide to Jefferson Davis and a Brigadier-General in the Confederate Army, ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary (New York: D. Appleton, 1905; London: Heinemann, 1905).

9 M. M. Kirkman to Isabella Martin, March 28, 1905, in Williams-Chesnut-Manning Collection, South Caroliniana Library, hereinafter cited as W-C-M Collection.

10 Ben Ames Williams, House Divided (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947); A Diary From Dixie, Ben Ames Williams, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).

11 Alfred Hoyt Bill, “The Journal of the Confederacy,” Saturday Review, December 31, 1949, p. 19.

12 Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 279, 280.

13 C. Vann Woodward, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

14 Quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, Confederate Women (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 3.

15 MBC to Varina Davis, June 18, 1883, in Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond. This letter has been included in Allie Patricia Wall, “The Letters of Mary Boykin Chesnut” (Master’s thesis, University of South Carolina, 1977), 83. Wall’s thesis contains nearly two dozen MBC letters and appropriate annotations. Since Wall’s work was completed, many more letters by MBC have been found in private collections. Transcripts of all letters and manuscript material quoted herein are my own.

16 Prior to the publication of a sketch by Margaretta P. Childs in Edward T. Jones et al. (eds.), Notable American Women: 1607–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 327–30, the most extensive biographical sketch of Chesnut was in Isabella Martin’s introduction to the 1905 edition. Subsequent to Mrs. Child’s pioneering article, Bell I. Wiley included a long chapter on MBC in Confederate Women. Both Childs and Wiley used the collection of Chesnut manuscripts at the South Caroliniana Library, but both focused on the Martin-Avary and the Williams editions of A Diary From Dixie and have little to say about MBC’s life exclusive of 1861–1865.

TWO

1 The only source of information about Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s birthplace is a statement in her unpublished autobiographical novel “Two Years—or The Way We Lived Then,” hereinafter cited as “Two Years.” Quotations from “Two Years” will be taken from the edited text of the novel which comprises Part III of Elisabeth S. Muhlenfeld, “Mary Boykin Chesnut: The Writer and Her Work” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1978); see p. 118 of edited text. Mount Pleasant is sometimes called Pleasant Hill. Statesburg (early nineteenth-century spelling) is today called Stateburg.

2 Published sources give Stephen Decatur Miller’s father’s name as William. However, other documents prove that his name was Charles. The error apparently arose from a missing comma in a letter from Stephen Decatur Miller to his daughter Mary, dated White Sulphur, July 23, 1835, Chesnut Family Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; a MS copy of the letter in MBC’s hand is in the W-C-M Collection. One brother, Charles, served as state senator from Claremont prior to Stephen Decatur Miller’s election in 1822. Another, John L. Miller, was a doctor. Some sources claim that Stephen’s father died when Stephen was still a boy, and that Miller sold his modest inheritance of three slaves to attend college. A Brief Memoir of Stephen Decatur Miller, Whilom Governor of South Carolina, and United States Senator from the Same State (no author, publisher, or date; probably published in the 1870s) describes a family scene around the dinner table in which Stephen’s father said, “‘wife, I can only send one of these boys to college which shall it be?’ and his mother replied ‘Let it be Stephen’”

3 Little biographical information about Stephen Decatur Miller is available. Elias Dick Miller seems to have been born in 1815 because according to John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina (Charleston: S. G. Courtenay, 1859), II, 413, he died in 1832, and in a manuscript fragment of six pages in the W-C-M Collection, MBC says he was seventeen when he died. Of the published biographical sketches of Miller, O’Neall’s is probably the most accurate. O’Neall had access to Miller’s letter of 1835 (see note 2 above), which MBC must have lent to him, and we may therefore assume that she was in correspondence with O’Neall about the sketch and probably gave him much data not available in other sources. A brief sketch of Miller in Thomas J. Kirkland and Robert M. Kennedy, Historic Camden, (Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1926), II, 107–13, is useful because it quotes from several of Miller’s most important speeches.

4 Elizabeth H. Jervey (ed.), “Marriage and Death Notices from the City Gazette of Charleston, S.C.,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, XLVI (1945), 15.

5 Here and for many other specific dates used in this biography, I am indebted to Martha Williams Daniels, great-great-granddaughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, who graciously made available unpublished genealogical tables compiled for the Williams family. Sources for these tables vary but include such materials as family Bibles not available to me. Burwell Boykin’s service in the Revolution is mentioned in Kirkland and Kennedy, Historic Camden (1905), I. 348.

6 Died October 7, 1838, daughter of William Whitaker and Catherine Wiggins. Mary Whitaker was the sister of Elizabeth Whitaker, first wife of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• ONE Perspective and Retrospective
• TWO 1823–1836
• THREE 1836–1840
• FOUR 1840–1860
• FIVE 1861–1865
• SIX 1865–1876
• SEVEN 1877–1881
• EIGHT 1882–1886
• Notes
• List of Sources
• Index
• Illustrations