Mary Chesnut's Civil War

Customer Reviews:

Historic gossip & chatter........2007-03-14

Reading this book is like opening a door through time and having a daily cup of coffee & gossip session with Mary Chesnut. She was from a fine family with her father being a senator and one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina. Her husband, John Chesnut Jr., was also a senator before the war. He remained politically connected in the Confederacy. He was a general and an aid to Jefferson Davis. Given her situation in life it is not surprising that Mrs. Chesnut had an elite circle of friends and knew everyone that was anyone.
Mary loved to gossip and name drop and had very strong opinions on any given subject. She had no children so she had plenty of time to be self indulgent and a bit vain. She really must have been a fascinating person as people seem to be drawn to her. Varina Davis was one of her closest friends and she visited the Davis home frequently. She believed slavery to be wrong & hated the fact that there were so many racially mixed children that looked very much like the master of the plantations. She complained about the costs involved in keeping slaves and thought the time had come to abolish slavery. On the other hand, she spoke of slaves like children that needed to be cared for. She also had never had to take care of herself or run a house. She relied totally on her servants for everything.
She wrote this diary with the intention of including rumors, facts,and anything she might be thinking at the time. John Bell Hood was a frequent visitor and is talked of in her diary quite frequently. She talked about Hood's love for a woman and of his wounds. She referred to him as their "wounded knight". She was a very opinionated, outspoken, and (I think) spoiled women. There are no great military strategies and battle description in her book. She describes the dinners they had or how people were dressed. She talks of all the gossip about all the differert generals and the politics of the day. Reading her diary is like sitting down for coffee with her and listening to the events,real or rumored, that she chats about. She loves all the gossip and thrives on attention She had a front row seat to all events about the war, civilian life, and the downfall of the Confederacy It's wonderful to have the chance to get to know Mary Chesnut with her candid way of writting. She also writes of the trials and tribulations when everything was crashing down aroound her. Her first experience of wearing old clothes, food shortages, no money, & wondering all the while what was going to happen to her and her husband. People were dying all around her and her. Her entire culture & lifestyle were disapearing, everything simply falling apart, yet she kept up her writting. What a fascinating woman Mrs. Mary Chesnut must have been.
It may be a little difficult to read for some. I think maybe most difficult for men for much of it is "idle chatter" that women do when they get together. There is much information in here that you can only get from someone in the middle of it all.

Hard to Read.......2007-02-12

This book is very interesting but it is hard to follow. The intro is very interesting but once you get into the diary part she skips from one topic to another and it assumes a lot. I think it will be worthwhile - it is just going to take me a while to get through it.

Immerse Yourself In Chesnut's Suffering World.......2005-09-17

Mary Chesnut was a name dropper, and thank goodness, because in passing along her gossip, opinions, news, and personal undertakings, she created the most comprehensive day-to-day record of life in the Confederacy that we have. Although this is both a diary and a later refurbishment of earlier writings (to the point it almost becomes a memoir in epistolary form) Mrs. Chesnut, an aristocratic lady in a position to know a great deal about the workings of her short-lived nation, makes everything seem like a first-hand conversation. Chesnut, like Mrs. Grant and Amanda Wilson, a Civil War-era diarist from Cincinnati, Ohio, has a true gift at making the distant seem immediate. Her reports on the initial euphoria of southern independence from the north and later the reality of hardship and war, are touching, even for one not in deep sympathy with her ideals. What I took away from this diary was something of the horror of loss, as Mary Chesnut's society reeled from death after death, not just of men from combat, but children and women in part from the deprivations war mandated they endure. By the mid-point of her diary, it is a rare entry, indeed, in which Chesnut does not tell of the passing of at least one more friend, or son of a friend. She lived through the destruction of a society and a war in which blood flowed in rivers. Chesnut personally knew a number of the primary figures of the American Civil War, including the wife of Jefferson Davis. She gives a point of view that is not hamstrung by being modern in sensibility, and charts a course of the war's prosecution that might vicariously suggest a later alteration of the record in northern-authored history books. For all these reasons, Chesnut's diary is worth reading.

America's best diary.......2005-04-10

"Mary Chesnuts's Civil War" is a monumental reading task: lviii introductory pages, 836 pages of smallish text, and 49 index pages listing more than 1,000 people mentioned in the text. The Editor received a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

The diary (actually much of it was written or elaborated nearly twenty years later) begins on February 16, 1861 at the time of the secession of the Southern states from the Union and ends abruptly on July 26, 1865 after the surrender of the Southern armies. Mrs. Chesnut, the friend of Southern leaders such as Jefferson Davis, spent most of the war years in Richmond and her plantation home in South Carolina.

Mary Chesnut purveys gossip among the elite and offers sharply worded opinions about the South, its leaders, negroes, and slavery. On page 71, we see for example that Robert E. Lee is being called a traitor by some people after his early military failures. Of Gen. Joe Johnston she says, "Being such a good hater, it is a pity he had not elected to hate somebody else than the president of our country." An outspoken woman of about 40 with a goodly share of self esteem Mrs Chesnut does not spare her husband -- who she despises -- and acquaintances from her worldly opinions. With passages on virtually every aspect of day to day living as well as the rush of events leading the downfall of the South, the diary of Mary Chesnut may be the best single source about life in the South during the Civil War.

The most vivid passages in the diary are about the end of the war when the fashionable Mrs. Chesnut feels the pinch of poverty and despair as the Yankee armies conquer South Carolina and burn down her plantation home. She captures the fear of Southerners, "as of a Bengal tiger in the home" of the Yankees and of the newly-freed negroes. "The weight that hangs upon our eyelids -- is of lead"

I haven't read this book cover to cover. I pick it up occasionally and randomly read a few pages or look up the entry for a event of interest. There is sufficient material to spend weeks reading and puzzling out the meaning of elliptical statements or distant relationships or obscure references. The Editor has done a splendid job identifying in notes nearly all of the people Ms. Chesnut mentions and in clarifying the events to which she refers. This is a book you might choose to take to a desert island as it is nearly unconquerable as well as fascinating.

Smallchief

A good way to immerse yourself in the time.......2000-07-18

I found the reading of this Pulitzer-prize-winning book an excellent way to seem to live in South Carolina and Virginia during the Civil War. I have no Southern background, and have always been pleased the Civil War turned out as it did, but his book gives some insight into the thinking of the secessionists and Southerners in the time of the War. The book is excellently edited, and the literary footnotes are a big help to see what the intelligent Southerner was reading during the war. Now I would like to read a biography of Mrs. Chesnut or of her husband. (The frank tension between Mary and her husband is an interesting sidelight to the main story of the diary.)

The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (A Galaxy Book)

Average customer rating:

5 stars as source for papers, 3 stars as a reading experi
America's Own Pepys

The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (A Galaxy Book)
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

A Diary From Dixie
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman
Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Southern Biography Series)
All for the Union: The Civil War Diary & Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes

ASIN: 0195035135

Book Description

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward and Chesnut's biographer Elisabeth Muhlenfeld present here the previously unpublished Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. The ideal diarist, Mary Chesnut was at the right place at the right time with the right connections. Daughter of one senator from South Carolina and wife of another, she had kin and friends all over the Confederacy and knew intimately its political and military leaders. At Montgomery when the new nation was founded, at Charleston when the war started, and at Richmond during many crises, she traveled extensively during the war. She watched a world "literally kicked to pieces" and left the most vivid account we have of the death throes of a society. The diaries, filled with personal revelations and indiscretions, are indispensable to an appreciation of our most famous Southern literary insight into the Civil War experience.

Customer Reviews:

5 stars as source for papers, 3 stars as a reading experi.......2003-07-05

I've recently developed an interest in Civil War history, an era that had not heretofore intrigued me. In doing some reading on the subject, I kept coming across references to "the diaries of Mary Chesnut," and decided to read them. Most historians look upon these diaries as a major source of information on what took place in the South during the Civil War, because the lady was present at some of the important events and was certainly herself effected by them. As the editors write, she was often reduced to moving "eventually from one place of refuge to another as a fugitive from military invaders (p. x)" and "Living out of her trunk in hotels or rented rooms (p. x)." The quotations or information gleaned from this resource do indeed illuminate the narration in the historical works in which one comes across them. They are not, however, easy to read.

I gather from the introduction to this book that the diaries had been edited for publication as a continuous narrative--minus the more embarrassing self-revelations--entitled by a hand other than the lady's a "Diary from Dixie." The author herself had died long before the book was ever printed, leaving the details of publication to a relative. The editors of the current text despair the latter work as "heavily cut and carelessly edited (p. ix)," because it prevents the reader from knowing well the lady as a character herself.

The Private Mary Chesnut is just what the Diary from Dixie is not, a real diary. As such, it contains entries that are for the most part endless mentions of people with whom the reader probably will not be knowledgeable unless he or she is very "into" the South and Civil War history. One is frequently reduced to checking the footnotes for information on the individuals named. Unfortunately the editors of the diary give only the barest of facts about them, usually social or military rank or relationship to Mrs. Chesnut or another individual mentioned in the diary. The writer's comments often leave one trying to read between her lines for some inkling of "what's really going on!" because there is the merest glimpse of some probably very interesting underlying story. The editors of the text, however, either will not or cannot give these details. Because of this dearth of underlying social information, the book comes across as either confusing or a little boring, a simple catalogue of parties and people met at parties, of polite social visits paid back and forth. This is definitely not an Edith Warton!

Spaced throughout the document are nuggets of truly golden information about the Civil War and antebellum period. [THOSE WRITING PAPERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE OR HISTORY TAKE NOTE] Because the lady was well connected by virtue of her own social status and oft sought company, she is privileged to the opinions of and gossip about significant individuals. She knew people who had met or knew the Lincoln family and was herself intimately acquainted with the Jefferson Davis family. One of the more interesting quotes was gossip associated with Mary Todd Lincoln's notorious household economy in the White House (pp. 30 and 31-32). This gives a much truer picture of what the social elite thought of the Lincolns, particularly in the South, and makes clear, that Washington D. C. was--and probably still is--more part of the southern social milieu than that of northern or national.

Certainly the lady herself comes across quite real in these diaries. In short she is often vain, opinionated, over-indulged, and wasteful by modern standards--at least by middle class standards--but she is also a well educated, astute and outspoken judge of political events and of the social ills of the institution of slavery. [THOSE WRITING PAPERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE OR HISTORY TAKE NOTE] Her discourse on its ills, particularly of misogynation, are eminently quotabl--and often are. My favorite is that beginning with "I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse on any land (p. 42-43)," etc.

While the book is difficult to get through, for those with a desire to know more than just the bare facts about the Civil War period and its society, this book is probably a good source for that information. [THOSE WRITING PAPERS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE OR HISTORY TAKE NOTE] This would definitely be considered a primary rather than a secondary source for the topic.

America's Own Pepys.......2000-05-02

This is the one indispensible book for anyone interested in what went on in the South behind the battle lines. As Pepys gives us a living picture of the London and court of Charles II, so does M. Chesnut give us a bird's eye view of the Confederate government and the society she lived in.

A wise and witty woman, Mary Chesnut spent most of the war years close to ground zero in Richmond, VA. She knew Jefferson and Varina Davis intimately. She rubbed elbows with congressmen and cabinet members. Mrs. Chesnut was a sharp tongued woman who pulled no punches and she tells us much that, but for her, would remain unknown about the leaders of the "Lost Cause".

Anyone who enjoyed the Woodward/Muhlenfeld editon of Mary Chesnut's memoirs can't afford to miss this publication of the materials from which she created her masterpiece.

A Diary From Dixie
Average customer rating:

History From the Inside

The southern homefront

Superseded Edition of a Classic

5 Stars for educational value

An invaluable insight into the Southern Confederacy

A Diary From Dixie
Mary Boykin Chestnut , and Ben Ames Williams
Manufacturer: Gramercy
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Historical | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | United States | Historical | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
General | Civil War | United States | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
Confederacy | Civil War | United States | Americas | History | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (A Galaxy Book)

Mary Chesnut's Civil War

Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman

All for the Union: The Civil War Diary & Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes

Mary's World: Love, War, and Family Ties in Nineteenth-century Charleston

ASIN: 0517182661
Release Date: 1997-03-25

Book Description

This original diary of the wife of Confederate General James Chestnut, Jr., who was also an aide to President Jefferson Davis, provides an eyewitness narrative of all the years of the war. Period photographs illustrate this you-are-there account of the daily lives and tribulations of all who suffered through the war, from ordinary people to the Confederacy's generals and political figures.

Customer Reviews:

History From the Inside.......2006-01-04

Mary Chestnut's diary received great exposure as a result of Ken Burns' documentary on PBS. It is well worth reading because 90% of the history we read of the American Civil War focuses on the military campaigns and the politics. Ms. Chestnut tells us more about the social impact of the war than we get from most authors. On top of that, she was a highly intelligent woman who was writing things in confidence that she would be unlikely to say outloud. She had a unique window into the workings of southern society and Confederate politics and she was completely honest in her evaluations. What we get here are very carefully worded opinions that no self-respecting southerner would have dared to admit in 1863. On the topic of slavery, Ms. Chestnut declares, "Ours is a monstrous system." Amid newspaper reports blasting Union General Grant for his brutal tactics and lack of finesse, Ms. Chestnut observes, "He has the disagreeable habit of not retreating before our irresistable veterans." All in all, hers is one of the most honest and well-written accounts of civilian life in the south during the Civil War.

The southern homefront.......2005-06-24

C-Span did a series called "American Writers" in 2001 and although I consider myself well read it was the first time I had ever heard of Mary Chesnut.

This story of the Civil War, told from the perspective of the civilians at home, was a real eye opener. Mary Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate general, was well off, but even Mary and the ladies in her circle couldn't get shoes to replace their worn ones and could only afford the outrageous prices for food because they had money. One can only imagine the suffering of those less fortunate. Life for civilians was severe and the news from the front, often heartbreaking, added to their woes. This is a unique first person account of the Civil War.

I remember reading that the author of "Gone With the Wind", Margaret Mitchell, did about five years of research before she actually started writing her book. I feel it is highly likely that she read Mary Chesnut's book as part of that research.

Superseded Edition of a Classic.......2005-04-09

Mary Chesnut's diary of life in the South during the American Civil War is possibly the best of all American diaries. You could spend weeks making your way through the labyrinth of events -- trivial and important -- and personalities found in the diary.

This edition of the diary is superseded by a better one: "Mary Chesnut's Civil War" edited by C. Vann Woodward which won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Woodward's edition offers a more complete text and is heavily footnoted with explanatory material. The text in Woodward includes many interesting passages excluded from "A Diary from Dixie" because of limitations of space and because some of them reflected unfavorably on the South and Southerners.

One virtue of this edition is a fine foreword about the diary by literary critic Edmund Wilson, but Wilson's foreword can also be read in his book "Patriotic Gore." I recommend you read Woodward's "Mary Chesnut's Civil War" instead of this book.

Smallchief

5 Stars for educational value.......2004-07-23

This book deserves 5 stars for educational value alone. While it does have its slow points, I can say that I have learned more about antebellum culture and Southern war perspective from this book than any other I have read up to this point. The book gives us a glimpse into the mindsets of a demographic of the Southern population we can rarely find anywhere else, and it's incredible to believe that this work was almost thrown into the fire for fear of capture when McClellan's forces dwelt a mere six miles from Richmond's door in early 1862.

An invaluable insight into the Southern Confederacy.......2003-10-03

This primary source document is one of the best windows we have into southern society during the American Civil War. Mary Chestnut was a southern aristocrat, married to the man who was the first to resign his seat in the US Senate before the war. She knew many prominent Confederate leaders well--Jefferson Davis, John Bell Hood, and Wade Hampton among them--and was acquainted with nearly all of the major players in the war (she even spent several occasions in the company of Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston). Because she knew so many people, she was in a position to cast a very revealing light on the war from the southern point of view.

Besides knowing so many influential leaders, Mary Chestnut also lived in both Confederate capitals--Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia--while they were the government seats. Her husband's plantation was in South Carolina, and in fact her home in Columbia, South Carolina lay right in the path of Sherman's destructive march through the South. As such, Chestnut is poised to offer very interesting commentary on the fire that burned much of that city. Mary and her husband gave their all to the Confederacy, and lost much of what they had because of the Civil War.

Several things in this journal are unique and worthy of mention. First, Chestnut and her friends are living the high life for much of the war, having parties, dinners, and luncheons and more-or-less living it up, even when the Yankees are approaching Richmond. They live comfortable lives, and, though Mary has a very insightful perspective into the suffering of her soldiers, she often spends as much time complaining about some minor inconvenience (such as being without her maid for a week) as she does deploring the sorry state of the starved and ill-clothed soldiers. Mary does what she can, and helps in many ways, but she is not willing to give up her parties, even when her husband repeatedly begs her too.

This diary also provides a unique view of slavery. A staunch abolitionist, Chestnut hated slavery less for the cruel treatment of the slaves than for the insolent behavior of many of them. Her husband's slaves were well taken care of, and did less work than they consumed in goods. Mary recounts many horrific tales of what happened when the slaves were set free--a story of a white family going along a road and picking up a wagonload of Negro infants which had been abandoned by parents enjoying their freedom, for example. She never questions that slavery is wrong, but she does argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe's account of slavery was the exception, not the rule. This is an interesting perspective, whatever the truth of it.

All in all, this is a great diary, and a splendid resource. Thank goodness this book has been reissued. The edition edited by Ben Ames Williams contained unsatisfactory notes, including some in which Williams shamelessly engaged in self-promotion of his novel. This book is indispensable for anyone looking for primary accounts of the human aspect of the war between the states.

Two Novels: The Captain and the Colonel / Two Years, or, The Way We Lived Then (The Publications of the Southern Texts Society)

Average customer rating:

Two Novels: The Captain and the Colonel / Two Years, or, The Way We Lived Then (The Publications of the Southern Texts Society)
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
Manufacturer: University of Virginia Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0813920582

Book Description

As the well-educated and socially skilled wife of a prominent Confederate, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-86) was ideally situated—and intellectually equipped—to record the narrative of daily life in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet while she is widely recognized for the significant contribution of her "diaries," Mary Chesnut's other works chronicling her experiences in the Civil War South have remained—until now—unpublished and virtually unknown.

Intensely autobiographical novels, The Captain and the Colonel and Two Years—or The Way We Lived Then are Chesnut's fictionalized accounts of the world as women experienced it in the mid-nineteenth century South. These short, unfinished novels address a wide range of subjects related to women, and serve as an extension of the valuable source material found in the diaries, revealing much about southern history and culture, gender roles, slave-mistress relations, childhood, education, the experiences of westward migration, and the impact of the Civil War on private lives and relationships.

Book Description

Chesnut's keen insight into political, economic, and social developments makes her an excellent source to understand the Southern homefront during the Civil War.

Customer Reviews:

Great history and a great read.......2000-05-21

This is one of the best books around in the growing fields of both women's history and the history of the American South. DeCredico, a professor at the United States Naval Academy who is one of today's most respected Civil War historians, paints a fascinating picture of one Southern woman's life before, during, and after the Civil War. A must read for scholars and interested lay readers alike!

Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Southern Biography Series)

Average customer rating:

The definitive biography on Chesnut

Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (Southern Biography Series)
Elisabeth Muhlenfeld
Manufacturer: Louisiana State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

General | Military | History | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (A Galaxy Book)
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
A Diary From Dixie
Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman's Life (American Profiles)
African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (The American History Series)

ASIN: 0807118044

Customer Reviews:

The definitive biography on Chesnut.......1998-11-20

This is the best biography of Chesnut to date. Muhlenfeld draws from all of Chesnut's writing, not just her famous Civil War diaries, to build a picture of a woman and a writer.

A diary from Dixie,: As written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of James Chesnut, jr., United States senator from South Carolina, 1859-1861

Average customer rating:

A diary from Dixie,: As written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of James Chesnut, jr., United States senator from South Carolina, 1859-1861
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
Manufacturer: D. Appleton & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

A diary from Dixie: As written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of James Chesnut, Jr., United States senator from South Carolina, 1859-1861, and afterward ... a brigadier-general in the Confederate army;

Average customer rating:

A diary from Dixie: As written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of James Chesnut, Jr., United States senator from South Carolina, 1859-1861, and afterward ... a brigadier-general in the Confederate army;
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
Manufacturer: Peter Smith
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Average customer rating:

MARY CHESNUT'S CIVIL WAR

Manufacturer: YALE U.PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000HAXM7G

Average customer rating:

Mary Chesnut's Civil War
C. Vann editor) Woodward
Manufacturer: Yale Univ. Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LEZ19K

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books