Second Look

Reconsidering a Mary Boykin Chesnut Letter

BY ELISABETH MUHLENFELD WOLLAN

Of 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.

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 trenchant observations of the events unfolding before her eyes.

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.

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 Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, winning Woodward (and, to my mind, Mary) the Pulitzer Prize.

I first encountered Mary Boykin Chesnut in 1975, when I began doctoral study in the Southern Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, where Chesnut’s papers were housed. I was not there to study history but the literature of the American South, with an emphasis on editing and literary criticism.

In my first semester, I encountered historian C. Vann Woodward, who had come to begin a full edition of the Chesnut diaries. I was privileged to lead the group transcribing the manuscripts and spent many hours talking with Dr. Woodward about the literary aspects of her book of the 1880s and how it compared with the original diaries of 1861-65. Since virtually no serious study had been done on Chesnut, I edited two of her manuscript novels for my dissertation and introduced them with a long biographical sketch, which soon became a book. Woodward drew on my work for the introductory matter in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War and wrote a generous forward to my Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography, published at the same time. Later we co-edited the original diaries under the title The Private Mary Chesnut.

Portrait of Mary Boykin Chesnut by Samuel Stillman Osgood.

Early on, I discovered that the Museum of the Confederacy had a single Chesnut letter which turned out to be of enormous importance. Written in 1883, it contained four sentences that were scholarly gold. They verified my understanding of the process and timing of MBC’s revision of her diary and of what literary critics call the “author’s intention”: “How I wish you could read over my Journal — I have been two years over looking it – copying — leaving my self out. You must see it – before it goes to print but that may not be just now. I mean the printing for I must overhaul it again – and again.” This was proof positive that MBC was in fact preparing her work for publication, had been “overhauling” it for two years (actually, her third attempt at a full-scale revision), and had more work to do.

Chesnut’s original 1860s diaries had been kept under lock and key and shared with no one, not even her husband. By comparing them with the longer work, we know that “leaving myself out” meant leaving out what she regarded as too personal (including her own petty complaints), mundane or trivial, and focusing instead on the world around her.

In fact, the 1883 letter contains a disquisition on Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, which speaks to that very point: “She had two motions — the one around her Sun – or brilliant husband - is delightful – the harder she hits him – the better fun – but when she turns on her own axis – and thrusts her homely details under our noses by the quire – she is a bore.”

My trip in 1976 to see that letter was my first visit to the Museum of the Confederacy and the White House of the Confederacy. In 1984, I delivered a lecture on “Mary Chesnut’s Portrait of Richmond” as part of the Museum’s annual Evening Series Lectures. Years later, I joined the board of the American Civil War Center and, following the merger with the MOC, the American Civil War Museum Board. One day last year, while I was serving a 14-month stint as interim President and CEO, historian John Coski brought me a copy of the Chesnut letter, and I read it again, some 45 years later. This time, the letter had more to teach me.

Certainly, America has changed in the last half-century; our cultural values, our perspectives on history, and our memorial landscape have all evolved. We know more now about the Civil War and its aftermath than we did then. Since the mid-1970s, dozens of women’s Civil War diaries, memoirs, and collections of letters have been published in print or online. Scholars have studied women’s lives during the war, the role of white and black women, slavery, and racism. Our understanding of the Lost Cause ideology – no secret to historians but only vaguely perceived by the general public – has been fleshed out and is reshaping what we know about Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era.

Given the passage of time, I now saw Mary’s letter with fresh eyes and found new things on which to focus. It provides an intimate glimpse of Mary and her circle grappling with how to live with and remember the defeat and desolation they have experienced – and how to shape it. We can see in the world she inhabits the first undertones of the developing Lost Cause narrative. And we can also watch Mary Chesnut, as always, render her world vividly alive with exuberant flashes of wit and sober reflection.

The letter is, for MBC, a quick one, dashed off before breakfast in the middle of a very busy time. She is expecting a houseful of guests to come for a week (“an avalanche of company is about to overwhelm us”). Old friends are arriving for the unveiling in two days’ time of a monument to the Confederate dead – one of the earliest of hundreds to be erected over the next century. Generals Wade Hampton and Milledge Luke Bonham, as well as Mary Preston Darby and Isabela Martin (two of the young women Mary had taken under her wing in Richmond and Columbia during the war years and both friends of Varina Davis) will be among the guests.

Carte-de-visite of Wade Hampton published by Y. Day, Memphis, Tennessee

Despite her “to do” list, a letter from Varina Davis that morning prompts an immediate answer. The two women had been friends since the late 1850s in Washington, D. C., and through the war years, the friendship had deepened. They had sat together at the Spotswood Hotel awaiting news of the Battle of Manassas and at the Davises’ mansion throughout the night of Stoneman’s Raid. The Chesnuts delayed their return to Columbia in 1864 because of the death of the Davises’ son in a fall from the piazza of the executive mansion. Mary describes sitting for hours in the Davises’ drawing room, listening to the president’s steps above her as he walked up and down through the night.

Varina’s sister Maggie Howell visited Mary in Columbia for weeks in 1864, and in October she hosted Jefferson Davis, prompting a note from Varina: “Thank you a thousand times my dear friend for your more than maternal kindness to my dear child — as to Mr. Davis he thinks the best ham — the best Madeira, the best coffee, the best hostess in the world, rendered Columbia delightful to him.” Varina ends her letter, “Do write as often as you can…. tell me of yourself, of your enjoyments your cares — every thing. I cannot bear to think we shall grow further apart until you forget me.”

Varina Davis, circa 1880

At war’s end, Varina and her children fled South, stopping with the Chesnuts briefly in Chester. Now as Mary writes her letter, Varina has apparently promised a recent picture of her youngest child, 19-year-old Winnie, who will soon become known as the “Daughter of the Confederacy”: “My Pie Cake’s photo has not come yet – but I look for it anxiously. I remember her placid – sweet sad angel face – at Chester - when our hearts were wrung.”

From the first, Mary Chesnut had been a stalwart Davis supporter, often outraged by the constant criticism of him. Now twenty years later, she begins with “Three cheers for Jeff Davis!! I am Davis straight out. I was. I am. And I always will be — heart and soul a good old confederate.” She refers to recent comments by Joseph Johnston as “blind spite” (“He suits the Yankees – so he prospers”). She notes that her nephew David Williams believes that if Lee were still alive, he would curb such calumny. Having learned of the death a month earlier of William “Constitution” Browne, another aide to Davis, Mary writes, “our military family in Richmond came up to us so vividly. And all that we were then — and are now.”

Mary’s letter is scattered with glimpses of her dayto-day life: her library where she is “overhauling” her journals; her husband’s library with its “bay window filled with Confed trophys” and books, where he hopes to write his own memoirs; and the “Yankee named Dodge” who has bought the Hampton-Preston mansion in Columbia, site of many scenes in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. She promises that “As soon as [my guests] go, I will give you a long letter -- and record the sayings and doings of your two best friends in the world: Mary Darby [and] Isabella.” She promises to record the chatter — the very technique she uses so effectively in her book. She closes her letter by creating a charming picture of a slumber party:

"Dearest – would you not like to drop in on Mary Darby, Isabella and me – about twelve or one at night – when we are in full blast? – we are to sleep in this same room – my house is so crowded I take them in my room on the first floor – away from the 'madding crowd.'”

"You do not know how glad I am to hear from you – and how I will parade it at the head of my table – with the So Ca FF’s [South Carolina First Families] to the fore – “My friend – Mrs. Davis – who is by far the cleverest woman I know – says . . . " Devotedly your friend and obedient servant MBC

Mary Chesnut as she appeared in the early 1880s.

Although few letters survive, until she died in 1886, Mary Boykin Chesnut continued to correspond with Varina Davis. Following her husband James’s death in February 1885, Mary indicated in a letter to Varina that she hoped to organize and publish General Chesnut’s papers. On March 25, 1885, Varina replied, “I think your diaries would sell better than any Confederate history of a grave character. Between us no one is so tired of Confederate History as the Confederates — they do not want to tell the truth or to hear it.”

Mary was too ill to complete either project. But Chesnut’s book has long since taken its rightful place as the most famous first-hand account of Southern society during the Civil War. Thanks in part to this 1883 letter, its author is now coming to be understood not simply as one of dozens of women diarists and letter writers of the Civil War era but as one of the best of our 19th-century writers, period.

Elisabeth Muhlenfeld Wollan is the author of Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (1981) and co-editor with C. Vann Woodward of The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (1984). She is a founding member of the ACWM Board of Trustees and served as interim CEO in 2020.

Mary Boykin Chesnut and James Chesnut, Jr., (c. 1840)