Mary Boykin Chesnut

(1823 - 1886)

The daughter of a South Carolina governor, Mary Boykin Miller married James Chesnut, the son of a wealthy landowner, in 1840, when she was seventeen. Her husband’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1858 brought the family to Washington, DC, where they became acquaintances of Jefferson Davis; they returned to South Carolina after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Mary’s account of the Confederacy during the Civil War spans February 1861 to July 1865. “This diary is an extraordinary document,” wrote literary critic Edmund Wilson a century later, “in its informal department, a masterpiece.”