Biography of mary boykin chesnut

Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller1823-1886, Diarist and Author Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut was born 31 March 1823 in Stateboro[*], S.C., eldest child of Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller, who had served as U.S. congressman and senator and in 1826 was elected governor of South Carolina as a proponent of nullification. Educated first at home and in Camden schools, Mary Miller was sent at 13 to a French boarding school in Charleston, where she remained for two years broken by a six-month stay on her father's cotton plantation in frontier Mississippi. In 1838 Miller died and Mary returned to Camden. On 23 April 1840 she married James Chesnut, Jr. (1815-85), only surviving son of one of South Carolina's largest landowners.

Chesnut spent most of the next 20 years in Camden and at Mulberry, her husband's family plantation. When James was elected to the Senate in 1858, his wife accompanied him to Washington where friendships were begun with many politicians who would become the leading figures of the Confederacy, among them Varina and Jefferson Davis. Following Lincoln's election, James Chesnut returned to South Carolina to participate in the drafting of an ordinance of secession and subsequently served in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. He served as aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and he achieved the rank of general. During the war, Mary accompanied her husband to Charleston, Montgomery, Columbia, and Richmond, her drawing room always serving as a salon for the Confederate elite. From February 1861 to July 1865 she recorded her experiences in a series of diaries, which became the principal source materials for her famous portrait of the Confederacy.

Following the war, the Chesnuts returned to Camden and worked unsuccessfully to extricate themselves from heavy debts. After a first abortive attempt in the 1870s to smooth the diaries into publishable form, Mary Chesnut tried her hand at fiction. She comple

During the Secession Winter of 1860-1861, one of the most respected ladies of Charleston, S.C., put pen to paper, beginning a remarkable diary of immense sophistication and insight into the political and societal realities of upper-class life in the South. The diarist, Mary Boykin Chesnut, was the wife of James Chesnut, a U.S. senator until South Carolina had seceded who went on to a brigadier generalcy in the Confederate Army and a position as a personal aide to Jefferson Davis.

Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, the daughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, an eminent Palmetto State politician recently returned from a term in the U.S. House of Representatives who would go on to serve as governor and in the U.S. Senate. Befitting her family’s station, young Mary was educated at Mme. Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies, becoming fluent in French and German. In April 1840, she married Chesnut, eight years her senior and the scion of another prominent South Carolina political family.

The Chesnuts had no children, so upon Mary’s death in 1886, the diary passed to her closest friend, Isabella D. Martin, who received the family’s blessing to seek publication. The first edition of the diary, although heavily abridged and edited, was printed in 1905 as A Diary from Dixie, with a fuller version released in 1949. A new, fully annotated edition, edited by C. Vann Woodward, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for history. Chesnut and her diary gained even greater fame with the release of Ken Burn’s documentary, The Civil War, which included numerous quotations from the book read by Academy Award-nominated actress Julie Harris.

American Confederacy Civil War diarist (1823–1886)

Mary Boykin Chesnut (née Miller; March 31, 1823 – November 22, 1886) was an American writer noted for a book published as her Civil War diary, a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle." She described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern slaveowner society, but encompassed all classes in her book. She was married to James Chesnut Jr., a lawyer who served as a United States senator and officer in the Confederate States Army.

Chesnut worked toward a final form of her book in 1881–1884, based on her extensive diary written during the war years. It was published in 1905, 19 years after her death. New versions were published after her papers were discovered, in 1949 by the novelist Ben Ames Williams, and in 1981 by the historian C. Vann Woodward, whose annotated edition of the diary, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981), won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary—the influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece" of the genre — as the most important work by a Confederate author.

Life

Mary Chesnut was born on March 31, 1823, on her maternal grandparents' plantation, called Mount Pleasant, near Stateburg, South Carolina, in the High Hills of Santee. Her parents were Stephen Decatur Miller (1788–1838), who had served as a U.S. Representative, and Mary Boykin (1804–85). In 1829 her father was elected Governor of South Carolina and in 1831 as a U.S. senator. The family then lived in Charleston. Mary was the oldest of four children; she had a younger brother Stephen and two sisters: Catherine and Sarah Amelia.

At age 13, Miller began her formal education in Charleston, South Carolina, where she boarded at Madame Talvande's French School for Young Ladies, which attracted daughters from the élite of the slaveowner class. Talvand