Mary Chesnut's Civil War by Mary Boykin Chesnut

In 1836, while in Charleston, 13-year-old Mary Boykin Miller met her future husband, James Chesnut, Jr. Mary lived in Mississippi for short periods between school terms but was much more fond of the city. He owned three cotton plantations and hundreds of slaves. It was a crude, rough frontier compared to Charleston. Leaving politics, her father took his family to Mississippi where he bought extensive acreage. Miller became fluent in French and German, and received a strong education. Talvande was among the many French colonial refugees who had settled in Charleston from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) after its revolution. Īt age 13, Miller began her formal education in Charleston, South Carolina, where she boarded at Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies, which attracted daughters from the élite of the slaveowner class. Mary was the oldest of four children she had a younger brother Stephen and two sisters: Catherine and Sarah Amelia. In 1829 her father was elected governor of South Carolina and in 1831 as a U.S.

Representative, and Mary Boykin (1804–85). Her parents were Stephen Decatur Miller (1788–1838), who had served as a U.S. Mary Chesnut was born on March 31, 1823, on her maternal grandparents' plantation, called Mount Pleasant, near Stateburg, South Carolina, in the High Hills of Santee. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary-the influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it 'a work of art' and a 'masterpiece' of the genre -as the most important work by a Confederate author. Vann Woodward, whose annotated edition of the diary, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981), won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. New versions were published after her papers were discovered, in 1949 by the novelist Ben Ames Williams, and in 1981 by the historian C. It was published in 1905, 19 years after her death. She was married to a lawyer who served as a United States senator and Confederate officer.Ĭhesnut worked toward a final form of her book in 1881–1884, based on her extensive diary written during the war years. Mary Boykin Chesnut (née Miller) (Ma– November 22, 1886) was an American 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.' She described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern slaveowner society, but encompassed all classes in her book.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War by Mary Boykin Chesnut