Mary Boykin Chesnut was a South Carolina author noted for a book published as her Civil War diary, a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle."
Education
At age 12, Miller began her formal education in Charleston, where she boarded at Mme. Talvande's French School for Young Ladies, which attracted daughters from the elite of the planter class.
Miller became fluent in French and German, and received a strong education.
Career
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 at their house at Mulberry Plantation near Camden. While the property was relatively isolated in thousands of acres of plantation and woodland, they entertained many visitors. Chesnut was aware of the historical importance of what she witnessed.
The diary was filled with the cycle of changing fortunes of the South during the Civil War. Chesnut edited it and wrote new drafts in 1881-1884 for publication, and retained the sense of events unfolding without foreknowledge. She had the sense of the South's living through its time on a world stage. Politically aware, Chesnut analyzed and portrayed the various classes of the South through the years of the war. She portrayed southern society in detail and studied the mixed roles of men and women. She was forthright about the complex and fraught situations related to slavery, particularly the abuses of sexuality and power. For instance, Chesnut discussed the problem of white planters' fathering mixed-race children with enslaved women within their extended households.
1905: A Diary From Dixie: Electronic Edition. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, 1823-1886, ed. by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary. New York: D. Appleton and Company 1905, available online as a part of the UNC-CH database "Documenting the American South."
1949: A Diary from Dixie, an expanded version edited by the novelist Ben Ames Williams to enhance its readability and annotated. Reissued in 1980 by Harvard University Press, with a "Foreword" by Edmund Wilson, originally published in 1962 as an essay on Chesnut.
1981: Mary Chesnut's Civil War, edited and Introduction by C. Vann Woodward. Reprinted in 1993 and available in preview online.
2002, Mary Chesnut, Two Novels, includes The Colonel and the Captain; and Two Years - or The Way We Lived Then, edited and Introduction by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, University of Virginia Press
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"The very rhythm of her opening pages at once puts us under the spell of a writer who is not merely jotting down her days but establishing, as a novelist does, an atmosphere, an emotional tone...Starting out with situations or relationships of which she cannot know the outcome, she takes advantage of the actual turn of events to develop them and round them out as if she were molding a novel."
Connections
Her parents were Mary Boykin (1804–85) and Stephen Decatur Miller (1788–1838), who had served as a U.S. Representative. In 1829 he was elected governor of South Carolina and in 1831 as a U.S. Senator. The family then lived in Charleston. Mary was the oldest of four children; she had a younger brother Stephen and two sisters: Catherine and Sarah Amelia. Leaving politics, her father took his family to Mississippi where he bought extensive acreage. It was a crude, rough frontier compared to Charleston. He owned three cotton plantations and hundreds of slaves. Mary lived in Mississippi for short periods between school terms but was much more fond of the city.