University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION

THE AUTHOR AND HER BOOK

IN Mrs. Chesnut's Diary are vivid pictures of the social
life that went on uninterruptedly in the midst of
war; of the economic conditions that resulted from
blockaded ports; of the manner in which the spirits of the
people rose and fell with each victory or defeat, and of the
momentous events that took place in Charleston, Montgomery,
and Richmond. But the Diary has an importance
quite apart from the interest that lies in these pictures.

Mrs. Chesnut was close to forty years of age when the
war began, and thus had lived through the most stirring
scenes in the controversies that led to it. (In this Diary, as
perhaps nowhere else in the literature of the war, will be
found the Southern spirit of that time expressed in words
which are not alone charming as literature, but genuinely
human in their spontaneousness, their delightfully unconscious
frankness. Her words are the farthest possible removed
from anything deliberate, academic, or purely intellectual.
They ring so true that they start echoes. The
most uncompromising Northern heart can scarcely fail to
be moved by their abounding sincerity, surcharged though
it be with that old Southern fire which overwhelmed the
army of McDowell at Bull Run.

In making more clear the unyielding tenacity of the
South and the stern conditions in which the war was prosecuted,
the Diary has further importance. At the beginning
there was no Southern leader, in so far as we can gather

from Mrs. Chesnut's reports of her talks with them, who
had any hope that the South would win in the end,
provided the North should be able to enlist her full
resources. The result, however, was that the South struck
something like terror to many hearts, and raised serious expectations
that two great European powers would recognize
her independence. The South fought as long as she had
any soldiers left who were capable of fighting, and at last
" robbed the cradle and the grave." Nothing then remained
except to "wait for another generation to grow
up." The North, so far as her stock of men of fighting
age was concerned, had done scarcely more than make a
beginning, while the South was virtually exhausted when
the war was half over.

Unlike the South, the North was never reduced to extremities
which led the wives of Cabinet officers and commanding
generals to gather in Washington hotels and
private drawing-rooms, in order to knit heavy socks for
soldiers whose feet otherwise would go bare: scenes like
these were common in Eichmond, and Mrs. Chesnut often
made one of the company. Nor were gently nurtured women
of the North forced to wear coarse and ill-fitting shoes, such
as negro cobblers made, the alternative being to dispense
with shoes altogether. Gold might rise in the North to 2.80,
but there came a time in the South when a thousand dollars
in paper money were needed to buy a kitchen utensil, which
before the war could have been bought for less than one
dollar in gold. Long before the conflict ended it was a
common remark in the South that, "in going to market,
you take your money in your basket, and bring your purchases
home in your pocket."

In the North the counterpart to these facts were such
items as butter at 50 cents a pound and flour at $12 a barrel.
People in the North actually thrived on high prices. Villages
and small towns, as well as large cities, had their
"bloated bondholders" in plenty, while farmers everywhere

were able to clear their lands of mortgages and put
money in the bank besides. Planters in the South, meanwhile,
were borrowing money to support the negroes in
idleness at home, while they themselves were fighting at
the front. Old Colonel Chesnut, the author's father-in-law,
in April, 1862, estimated that he had already lost half
a million in bank stock and railroad bonds. When the
war closed, he had borrowed such large sums himself and
had such large sums due to him from others, that he saw no
likelihood of the obligations on either side ever being discharged.

Mrs. Chesnut wrote her Diary from day to day, as the
mood or an occasion prompted her to do so. The fortunes
of war changed the place of her abode almost as frequently
as the seasons changed, but wherever she might be the
Diary was continued. She began to write in Charleston
when the Convention was passing the Ordinance of Secession.
Thence she went to Montgomery, Ala., where the
Confederacy was organized and Jefferson Davis was inaugurated
as its President. She went to receptions where,
sitting aside on sofas with Davis, Stephens, Toombs, Cobb,
or Hunter, she talked of the probable outcome of the war,
should war come, setting down in her Diary what she heard
from others and all that she thought herself. Returning to
Charleston, where her husband, in a small boat, conveyed
to Major Anderson the ultimatum of the Governor of South
Carolina, she saw from a housetop the first act pf war committed
in the bombardment of Fort Sumter. During the
ensuing four years, Mrs. Chesnut's time was mainly passed
between Columbia and Richmond. For shorter periods she
was at the Fauquier White Sulphur Springs in Virginia,
Flat Rock in North Carolina, Portland in Alabama (the
home of her mother), Camden and Chester in South Carolina,
and Lincolnton in North Carolina.

In all these places Mrs. Chesnut was in close touch
with men and women who were in the forefront of the

social, military, and political life of the South. Those
who live in her pages make up indeed a catalogue of the
heroes of the Confederacy—President Jefferson Davis,
Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, General Robert E.
Lee, General "Stonewall" Jackson, General Joseph E.
Johnston, General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, General Wade
Hampton, General Joseph B. Kershaw, General John B.
Hood, General John S. Preston, General Robert Toombs,
R. M. T. Hunter, Judge Louis T. Wigfall, and so many
others that one almost hears the roll-call. That this
statement is not exaggerated may be judged from a
glance at the index, which has been prepared with a
view to the inclusion of all important names mentioned in
the text.

As her Diary constantly shows, Mrs. Chesnut was a
woman of society in the best sense. She had love of companionship,
native wit, an acute mind, knowledge of books,
and a searching insight into the motives of men and women.
She was also a notable housewife, much given to hospitality;
and her heart was of the warmest and tenderest, as those
who knew her well bore witness.

Mary Boykin Miller, born March 31, 1823, was the
daughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, a man of distinction
in the public affairs of South Carolina. Mr. Miller was
elected to Congress in 1817, became Governor in 1828, and
was chosen United States Senator in 1830. He was a
strong supporter of the Nullification movement. In 1833,
owing to ill-health, he resigned his seat in the Senate and
not long afterward removed to Mississippi, where he engaged
in cotton planting until his death, in March, 1838.

His daughter, Mary, was married to James Chesnut, Jr.,
April 23, 1840, when seventeen years of age. Thenceforth
her home was mainly at Mulberry, near Camden, one of
several plantations owned by her father-in-law. Of the
domestic life at Mulberry a pleasing picture has come down

to us, as preserved in a time-worn scrap-book and written
some years before the war:

James Chesnut, Jr., was the son and heir of Colonel
James Chesnut, whose wife was Mary Coxe, of Philadelphia.
Mary Coxe's sister married Horace Binney, the eminent
Philadelphia lawyer. James Chesnut, Jr., was born in 1815
and graduated from Princeton. For fourteen years he
served in the legislature of South Carolina, and in January,
1859, was appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States
Senate. In November, 1860, when South Carolina was
about to secede, he resigned from the Senate and thenceforth
was active in the Southern cause, first as an aide to
General Beauregard, then as an aide to President Davis,
and finally as a brigadier-general of reserves in command
of the coast of South Carolina.

General Chesnut was active in public life in South Carolina
after the war,-in so far as the circumstances of Reconstruction
permitted, and in 1868 was a delegate from that
State to the National convention which nominated Horatio
Seymour for President. His death occurred at Sarsfield,
February 1, 1885. One who knew him well wrote:

The Chesnuts settled in South Carolina at the close of
the war with France, but lived originally on the frontier of
Virginia. Their Virginia home had been invaded by French
and Indians, and in an expedition to Fort Duquesne the
father was killed. John Chesnut removed from Virginia
to South Carolina soon afterward and served in the Revolution
as a captain. His son James, the "Old Colonel,"
was educated at Prineton, took an active part in public
affairs in South Carolina, and prospered greatly as a
planter. He survived until after the War, being a nonogenarian
when the conflict closed. In a charming sketch of
him in one of the closing pages of this Diary, occurs the
following passage: "Colonel Chesnut, now ninety-three,
blind and deaf, is apparently as strong as ever, and certainly
as resolute of will. Partly patriarch, partly grand
seigneur, this old man is of a species that we shall see no
more; the last of a race of lordly planters who ruled this
Southern world, but now a splendid wreck."

Three miles from Camden still stands Mulberry. During
one of the raids committed in the neighborhood by Sherman's
men early in 1865, the house escaped destruction
almost as if by accident. The picture of it in this book
is from a recent photograph. A change has indeed come
over it, since the days when the household servants and dependents
numbered between sixty and seventy, and its owner
was lord of a thousand slaves. After the war, Mulberry
ceased to be the author's home, she and General Chesnut
building for themselves another to which they gave the
name of Sarsfield. Sarsfield, of which an illustration is
given, still stands in the pine lands not far from Mulberry.
Bloomsbury, another of old Colonel Chesnut's plantation
dwellings, survived the march of Sherman, and is now the

home of David R. Williams, Jr., and Ellen Manning, his
wife, whose children roam its halls, as grandchildren of the
author's sister Kate. Other Chesnut plantations were Cool
Spring, Knight's Hill, The Hermitage, and Sandy Hill.

The Diary, as it now exists in forty-eight thin volumes,
of the small quarto size, is entirely in Mrs. Chesnut's handwriting.
She originally wrote it on what was known
as "Confederate paper," but transcribed it afterward.
When Richmond was threatened, or when Sherman was
coming, she buried it or in some other way secreted it from
the enemy. On occasion it shared its hiding-place with
family silver, or with a drinking-cup which had been presented
to General Hood by the ladies of Richmond. Mrs.
Chesnut was fond of inserting on blank pages of the Diary
current newspaper accounts of campaigns and battles, or
lists of killed and wounded. One item of this kind, a newspaper
"extra," issued in Chester, S. C., and announcing
the assassination of Lincoln, is reproduced in this volume.

Mrs. Chesnut, by oral and written bequest, gave the
Diary to her friend whose name leads the signatures to this
Introduction. In the Diary, here and there, Mrs. Chesnut's
expectation that the work would some day be printed
is disclosed, but at the time of her death it did not seem
wise to undertake publication for a considerable period.
Yellow with age as the pages now are, the only harm that
has come to them in the passing of many years, is that a
few corners have been broken and frayed, as shown in one
of the pages here reproduced in facsimile.

In the summer of 1904, the woman whose office it
has been to assist in preparing the Diary for the press,
went South to collect material for another work to follow
her A Virginia Girl in the Civil War. Her investigations
led her to Columbia, where, while the guest of Miss
Martin, she learned of the Diary's existence. Soon afterward
an arrangement was made with her publishers under
which the Diary's owner and herself agreed to condense

and revise the manuscript for publication. The Diary
found to be of too great length for reproduction in
full, parts of it being of personal or local interest rather
than general. The editing of the book called also for the
insertion of a considerable number of foot-notes, in order
that persons named, or events referred to, might be the
better understood by the present generation.

Mrs. Chesnut was a conspicuous example of the wellborn
and high-bred woman, who, with active sympathy and
unremitting courage, supported the Southern cause. Born
and reared when Nullification was in the ascendent, and
acquiring an education which developed and refined her
natural literary gifts, she found in the throes of a great
conflict at arms the impulse which wrought into vital expression
in words her steadfast loyalty to the waning fortunes
of a political faith, which, in South Carolina, had
become a religion.

Many men have produced narratives of the war between
the States, and a few women have written notable chronicles
of it; but none has given to the world a record more radiant
than hers, or one more passionately sincere. Every line in
this Diary throbs with the tumult of deep spiritual passion,
and bespeaks the luminous mind, the unconquered soul, of
the woman who wrote it.