A Diary from Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut

First published: 1905

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1861-1865

Locale: Montgomery, Alabama; Richmond, Virginia; and Charleston and Camden, South Carolina

Principal Personages:

• Mary Chesnut, a highly educated, wellborn observer of Civil War events and people
• James Chesnut, Jr., Mary’s husband, a wealthy and influential Southern planter, senator, and general
• Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and a close friend of the Chesnuts
• Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States during the war years, who is mentioned frequently in the diary
• Sarah Buchanan (“Buck”) Preston, a beautiful young friend of Mary who had a romance with Confederate General John Bell Hood

Form and Content

Mary Chesnut kept her journal from early in 1861, just before the Civil War began, to shortly after the end of the war, in 1865. Her commentary on the conversations and events of her day reveals a keen awareness of the oppression to which women—black or white, slave or free—were subjected during that period. While she would not consider herself a feminist, her diary reveals sensibilities and concerns that place her far ahead of her time and led to problems in the publication of her work after her death.

Chesnut’s diary is also important as a historical document. Since she and her husband were socially prominent and he was a major figure in the war itself, everyone who was important in the war was dramatized in her pages. Because of the Chesnuts’ position, they were always at the scene of major events—in Montgomery, Alabama, for the formation of the Confederacy and later in Richmond, Virginia, its second capital; in Charleston, South Carolina, for the firing on Fort Sumter, which began the hostilities of the war; in various towns and cities near the path of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea, often just escaping capture; and after the end of the war, back at their plantation near Camden, South Carolina. After the South’s defeat, the Chesnuts experienced the terrors and privations of the war’s aftermath: poverty, raids, destruction, and at times near starvation.

Yet it would be misleading to think that one can learn from the diary only about major events of the war. Mary Chesnut was interested in and cared about everything. She wrote about the slaves on the plantation with the same attention to the individual that she gave to major social, political, and military figures, so that the reader learns much about slavery and the pain of her position as a slaveowner morally opposed to the institution of slavery. An avid lover of literature, Mary Chesnut read, and commented astutely upon in the diary, almost every major English, American, and French writer of her time, and she personally knew important Southern writers, such as William Gilmore Simms and Paul Hamilton Hayne. She was passionately interested in the lives of women of all ranks of society, from the African American slave women, to the white Sandhill women (normally the sort called “poor white trash” in the South) who begged food from her family, to the women of the first families in Southern society. She considered the lives of women of every station to be a form of slavery in a male-dominated culture, and she wrote about them all, leaving a document just as important to the understanding of women’s history as it is to the knowledge of a watershed political and military crisis.

The diary has a complicated publication history. The journals were written in the 1860’s, but Chesnut revised them extensively in the 1880’s, hoping to see them published. Severe ill health caused her to give up the work, however, and she bequeathed the journals to a young relative, Isabella Martin. Fearing that their frankness made them unsuitable for publication, Martin did little with them for some time. Fortunately, in 1904, Martin met Myrta Lockett Avary, a scholarly young Southern woman, and together they brought out the journals in 1905, both in serial publication and in book form, under the title A Diary from Dixie. They included less than half of the original work, and they revised freely in a mistaken attempt to “improve” on Chesnut’s writing. In 1949, Ben Ames Williams, a descendant of Mary Chesnut, brought out another edition of A Diary from Dixie. Though considerably longer than the 1905 version, Williams’ edition also improvises freely; he even added whole sentences of his own. According to Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Chesnut’s best biographer, neither Martin and Avary nor Williams acknowledged that their versions were greatly altered from the original. The diary finally found, nearly a century after Chesnut’s own revised version, an editor who was faithful to her text. The distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward, working from all of Chesnut’s versions, brought out in 1982 a definitive, faithful, and complete version of the diary; it won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in history. Noting that Mary Chesnut herself did not like the term “Dixie” and never used it, Woodward gave the diary a new title—Mary Chesnut’s Civil War.

Context

Chesnut was passionate about the plight of women, seeing all women, even the wealthiest, as slaves to men. Though she was very fond of her husband and of other male family members and friends, she was appalled at much male behavior and often exclaims against it in the diary. One of the horrors that most disgusted her was the practice (of which her husband was apparently not guilty) of white men raping slave women and keeping them and their children in the household. She draws a vivid comparison between women condemned as prostitutes and men whose households are shamelessly peopled with their unwilling mates and children. She felt sorry for all the women involved—both for the men’s wives and daughters and for the African American women—and for the children.

She also was shocked at the silence of women, except on the topics considered to be appropriate to them—social events, finery, the duties of the household. The much-praised softness of the voices of women she believed to be the result of this suppression: “So we whimper and whine, do we? Always we speak in a deprecating voice, do we? And sigh gently at the end of every sentence—why? . . . Do you wonder that we are afraid to raise our voices above a mendicant’s moan?” Along with this repression, Chesnut noted a contradictory impulse of men to blame the women they had rendered powerless: Her own husband “cannot forbear the gratification of taunting me with his ruin, for which I am no more responsible than the man in the moon. But it is the habit of all men to fancy that in some inscrutable way their wives are the cause of all evil in their lives.”

It is both appropriate and ironic that Chesnut’s diary was almost lost to history when the woman she trusted to be her editor long resisted publication because of Chesnut’s indelicacy. Isabella Martin thought that she was protecting her relative’s memory. This sentiment gives the reader some idea of the suppression of women’s voices that Mary Chesnut never accepted. One can be very glad that she did not, for she speaks as a woman and to women, and to men, in a voice that all people need to hear.

Bibliography

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. A brief but perceptive discussion of Mary Chesnut and her diary. Particularly valuable is the examination of specific characters and groups of characters.

Freeman, Douglas Southall. The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1964. Calling the diary “a remarkable human document,” Freeman offers passages from Chesnut’s character sketches.

Martin, Isabella D., and Myrta Lockett Avary. Introduction to 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 an Aide to Jefferson Davis and a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army, by Mary Chesnut. Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary. New York: Peter Smith, 1929. Chiefly interesting for Martin’s explanation of why she delayed publication of the diary for so long.

Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. The longest and best biography of Chesnut, it contains an overview of the diary and its publication history and seven chapters divided by milestones in Chesnut’s life. The study is based on Muhlenfeld’s 1978 University of South Carolina Ph.D. dissertation, “Mary Boykin Chesnut: the Writer and Her Work,” which also includes Chesnut’s memoir on her sister Kate and an essay on James Chesnut, Jr., Mary’s husband.

Williams, Ben Ames. House Divided. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1947. A Civil War novel by Mary Chesnut’s descendant who published the second major edition of the diary. Draws heavily on A Diary from Dixie, and one of the characters is modeled on Mary Chesnut herself.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Of the writings on Mary Chesnut, this work makes strongest case for the diary’s literary qualities. Wilson calls it “an extraordinary document—in its informal department, a masterpiece.”

Woodward, C. Vann. Introduction to Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, by Mary Chesnut. Edited by C. Vann Woodward. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. The best overall introduction to Chesnut’s life and work.