A Southern Lady & Diarist!

In my previous post of Pioneering Women of Civil War America (Thirteenth Installment) about Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, I promised I’d feature another woman of Civil War times who was “A Southern Lady & Diarist.” Let me now present to you:

Mary Boykin Miller Chestnut (1823 – 1886)

Same as my previous pioneering woman, Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, Mary was born and raised in South Carolina and into the wealth of the upcountry aristocratic society of planters around historic Stateburg—an area notable for lending Revolutionary-War heroes of Brigadier Generals Francis Marion (aka the “Swamp Fox”) and Thomas Sumter (aka the “Fighting Gamecock”) to cunningly and courageously give fits to the British. Both men pictured below, in order of mention.

Mary’s Legacy:

She recorded what is proclaimed to be the most important work by a Confederate author, surpassed by none for its keen observations and insights into the South during its life-and-death struggle. Her Civil War journal resulted in almost fifty notebooks of edits from Mary’s attempt to turn it into a publishable manuscript. Unfortunately, neither her journal nor her few novels were published by the time of her death. However, Mary entrusted her materials to former spinster schoolteacher and scholar Miss Isabella D. Martin, who appreciated the historical significance of Mary’s content and, many years post-Civil War, helped Mary with her revisions. Ultimately, Isabella would find a publisher (D. Appleton, New York) for Mary’s work, but it took her nineteen years after Mary’s death to do so, and less than half of it was integrated. It came to be titled A Diary from Dixie, and it was enthusiastically received and regarded by readers and scholars.

C. Vann Woodward, author of Mary Chestnut’s Civil War, which, in 1982, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, remarks in the “Forward” of author Elisabeth Muhlenfeld’s book, Mary Boykin Chestnut: A Biography:

“Mary Chestnut was a complex and paradoxical personality, and her book often does more to multiply than to answer the questions that it raises about the author. Among them are the puzzles of how such strong antislavery sentiment was bred in the very heart of a slave society and how such vehement feminism burst out of a thoroughly patriarchal order.”

So, it would seem that Mary had somehow managed to exorcise Northern sentiments to rival those of her Southern roots and that her keen observations and insights of events and people of Civil War times were written with neutrality.

What in Mary’s background gave her the tools to write such a vast undertaking with an un-biased eye?

Mary Boykin Chestnut was born unto strong civic-minded parents. Whereas Mary’s mother, Mary Boykin Miller, came from wealth within the plantar society, her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, rose to wealth and prominence through a higher education in law, in service to his state of South Carolina as a governor and both a United States representative and senator. Both parents instilled in Mary the values of honesty, duty, honor, a respect for those less fortunate, a zest for life, and a keen but genial observation of human nature.

How was Mary capable of recording so many observations of Civil War events and people?

Her societal status and her husband’s (James Chestnut, Jr.) political and military contributions as a South Carolinian delegate in Provisional Confederate Congress, an aide on the staffs of General P.G.T Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army gifted Mary:

A broad view of the political, social, and economic climate;

The advantage of being where she could observe noteworthy Civil War events; and

The time to record in her journal with her husband away a lot, tending to the politics and business of war, and without her having the responsibility of children.

Thus, her success was guaranteed!

I’ll end here with the hopes that you’ve enjoyed this post and that I’ve whet your appetite to learn more about Mary Boykin Miller Chestnut at the following places:

Video on My Complimentary Civil War Women Website.

Article Online at the National Park Service:
Mary Boykin Chestnut

Book on Amazon:
Mary Boykin Chestnut: A Biography by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld

Stay Tuned for the Next Installment of Pioneering Women of Civil War America, Which Promises to Feature. . .

. . .A Mighty Raider!