A View from the Plantation
By Bill Kauffman

In the remarkable diary she kept during the Civil War, South Carolinian Mary Chesnut informs us early on that “I was a seceder, but I dreaded the future.” For the next four years she records conversations, table talk (“One more year of Stonewall would have saved us”), and rumors of war. But her prophecy of June 1861, frank and enigmatic, stands: “Slavery has to go, of course—and joy go with it.”

 

Twenty years after joy’s emancipation, Chesnut revised and recast her journals, imparting to them a literary quality that sets the diary in the first rank of Civil War writings. Edmund Wilson, in his classic study Patriotic Gore, called Chesnut’s diary “an extraordinary document...a masterpiece.” But its author did not live to see its publication. Her lifetime literary earnings totaled $10: her pay for one article for the Charleston Weekly News and Courier.

 

Mary Chesnut was no plain folk; she was the daughter of South Carolina governor Stephen Miller, “credited with launching the ‘positive good’ defense of slavery,” in historian C. Vann Woodward’s words. Mary was educated at Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies in Charleston.

 

Her husband, James Chesnut, was the first U.S. senator to resign after Lincoln’s election. Yet his refusal to jockey for office in the Confederacy tried Mary’s always fragile patience: “I am certain of very few things in life now. This is one of them. Mr. C will never ask mortal man for any promotion for himself or for one of his family.”

 

Mary is a little catty (she notices the dullness, plain-Janeness, and embonpoint of other ladies), and a tad prideful: “It was a way I had, always, to stumble in on the real show.” Her reading is vast, her style tart, and her opinions strong. She defends Jefferson Davis to the last ditch, and she takes special satisfaction in reading purloined Yankee letters: “What a comfort the spelling was. We were willing to admit their universal free school education put their rank and file ahead of us literarily. Now these letters do not attest that fact. The spelling is comically bad.”

 

Though Mary Chesnut is a loyal daughter of the South, “a rebel born,” she is also something of an abolitionist: “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong.” 

 

In her hatred of slavery she is not, she insists, an anomaly: “Not one third of our volunteer army are slave owners,” writes Chesnut, and “not one third of that third fail to dislike slavery as much as Mrs. Stowe or Horace Greeley.”

 

But New England sanctimony rankles her: “On one side Mrs. Stowe, Greeley, Thoreau, Emerson, Sumner, in nice New England homes—clean, clear, sweet-smelling—shut up in libraries, writing books which ease their hearts of their bitterness to us.... What self-denial do they practice? It is the cheapest philanthropy trade in the world—easy.”

 

Fear strikes deep when her cousin, Betsey Witherspoon, is strangled to death in her bed by “her own people. Her Negroes.” Mary’s mother-in-law declines to eat, fearing that her slaves have poisoned her soup. Even the formidable Mary is shaken: “Somehow today I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?”

 

The diaries darken as the months pass. “War cloud lowering,” she reports in June 1861. Even sleep brings no respite, for “this horrible vision of the dead on the battlefield haunts me.” By June 1862 she records, “All things are against us.” And by September 1864, “The end has come...We are going to be wiped off the face of the earth.” Sherman burns South Carolina, and though the badly damaged Chesnut plantation is salvaged, Mary’s world is ashes and dust. She calls it the “Grand smash.” For consolation she puts down her English and French novelists and turns to Job. By February 1865, “Our world has gone to destruction.”

 

Amidst the ravages of war, the desolation of defeat, Mary remains incapable of self-pity. She vows in May 1865 never to whimper or pine, though “we are a crushed people, crushed to aught.” That vow, Mary Chesnut kept.