Second look Reconsidering a Mary Boykin Chesnut Letter BY ELISABETH MUHLENFELD WO L L A N
O
f the approximately 120,000 artifacts, documents, and photographs in the ACWM Collection, the one that has been most valuable to me personally is a letter written by Mary Boykin Chesnut to Varina Davis in 1883. It is among the many letters and papers donated to the Museum by the Davis Family.
trenchant observations of the events unfolding before her eyes.
As any student of the Civil War knows, Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823-1886) kept a diary during the Civil War, which she revised and expanded to become the finest first-hand account of life in the Confederacy. Daughter of U. S. congressman, governor, and senator from South Carolina Stephen Decatur Miller, Mary at age 17 married James Chesnut, Jr., the only surviving son of a large slaveholding family in South Carolina. Chesnut was the first U. S. senator to resign his position following Lincoln’s election, and Mary jotted down in a diary the first of her
Following Appomattox, the Chesnuts returned to South Carolina. There, Mary spent years revising her diaries of the war years but died before she had completed polishing them for publication. Nearly 20 years after her death, a severely truncated version was published as A Diary From Dixie, a title assigned by the Saturday Evening Post, which printed it in five installments in 1905. A second, longer edition, also heavily cut and “improved,” was published by Ben Ames Williams in 1949. Chesnut’s entire work was edited in 1981 by C.Vann Woodward under the title
8
FALL 2021
Throughout the next four years, MBC (as she abbreviated herself and I came to know her) was in an excellent position to observe the war. She was in Montgomery, Alabama, for the formation of the Provisional Confederate Congress. In Charleston she stood on a rooftop to watch the firing on Fort Sumter (the orders to fire having been given by her husband), and, in Richmond, she heard the strains of the Dead March following the first Battle of Manassas. Everywhere she went, her home served as a sort of salon for the elite of the Confederacy. The Chesnuts were close friends of the Davises, and when in Richmond, saw one another almost daily.
