Mary Chesnut's Civil War

Reading this book is like opening a door through time and having a daily cup of coffee & gossip session with Mary Chesnut. She was from a fine family with her father being a senator and one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina. Her husband, John Chesnut Jr., was also a senator before the war. He remained politically connected in the Confederacy. He was a general and an aid to Jefferson Davis. Given her situation in life it is not surprising that Mrs. Chesnut had an elite circle of friends and knew everyone that was anyone.Mary loved to gossip and name drop and had very strong opinions on any given subject. She had no children so she had plenty of time to be self indulgent and a bit vain. She really must have been a fascinating person as people seem to be drawn to her. Varina Davis was one of her closest friends and she visited the Davis home frequently. She believed slavery to be wrong & hated the fact that there were so many racially mixed children that looked very much like the master of the plantations. She complained about the costs involved in keeping slaves and thought the time had come to abolish slavery. On the other hand, she spoke of slaves like children that needed to be cared for. She also had never had to take care of herself or run a house. She relied totally on her servants for everything.She wrote this diary with the intention of including rumors, facts,and anything she might be thinking at the time. John Bell Hood was a frequent visitor and is talked of in her diary quite frequently. She talked about Hood's love for a woman and of his wounds. She referred to him as their "wounded knight". She was a very opinionated, outspoken, and (I think) spoiled women. There are no great military strategies and battle description in her book. She describes the dinners they had or how people were dressed. She talks of all the gossip about all the differert generals and the politics of the day. Reading her diary is like sitting down for coffee with her and listening to the events,real or rumored, that she chats about. She loves all the gossip and thrives on attention She had a front row seat to all events about the war, civilian life, and the downfall of the Confederacy It's wonderful to have the chance to get to know Mary Chesnut with her candid way of writting. She also writes of the trials and tribulations when everything was crashing down aroound her. Her first experience of wearing old clothes, food shortages, no money, & wondering all the while what was going to happen to her and her husband. People were dying all around her and her. Her entire culture & lifestyle were disapearing, everything simply falling apart, yet she kept up her writting. What a fascinating woman Mrs. Mary Chesnut must have been.It may be a little difficult to read for some. I think maybe most difficult for men for much of it is "idle chatter" that women do when they get together. There is much information in here that you can only get from someone in the middle of it all.

I led a class discussion on Mary Chestnut's Diary at the Osher Life Long Learning Institute ( OLLI ), senior college at the University of Southern Maine on March 13th. My class mates and I found the book tedious and repetitive because of its length ( over 800 pages ), but otherwise a valuable " insider's " view from the southern viewpoint. Mrs. Chestnut was the wife of a privileged United States Senator from South Carolina, who resigned from the Senate three days after Mr. Lincoln was elected, She reveals the fears and uncertainties: will there be a war or not, will the Yankees land at Charleston, why is there so much squabbling among some generals and President Jefferson Davis, is the South doomed? She was a feminist and against slavery, yet she railed against Harriest Beecher Stowe, Horace Greeley, Emerson, Thoreau and others who did not understand the South and who made money with their criticism of the ways of the cotton states. Her diary reveals a tendency to flirt with admirers, yet she thought herself old at 37! Childless and frustrated at her husband's code of southern chivalry which prevented him from playing " politics as usual ", she and her husband lost their financial stability with the fall of the South. The editing of this large volume by C. Vann Woodward is as skillful as Mary Chestnut is revealing. For example certain diary notations, found in her version of the journal from 1860 are contained in this latter 1880 journal. Therefore omissions bearing an editor's notation tell us what Mary originally thought, but later thought better of omitting. Thus we learn of her frustration about her husband's political reticence, her own tendency to throw " brickbats from her pocket " held in readiness for ripostes, and her ambition ( which knew no outlets ). Mary Chestnut did not stay home and bake cookies; she had tea or volunteered at private hospitals with the leading ladies of the Confederate cause and at dinners with the the Jefferson Davises ( to whose administration her husband served as an aide de camp ). She was privy to the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the South on the battle fields, entertained many generals and officers, and repeatedly criticised the South and General Beauregard for failing to pursue the fleeing Yankees after they were defeated at Bull Run ( Manassas ) all the way to the City of Washington regardless whether the South was properly equipped to do so.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War is a tough read. It's long. There are endless social engagements. There is a dizzying cast of characters, sometimes referred to by a nickname or an initial. There are countless allusions to literary works, named in footnotes but rarely explained. I could not follow many of Mary's trains of thought. But some of the numerous characters are regulars, and the reader can grab onto those persons as ropes. The analogies, when they are decipherable, are humorous. There are funny bits sprinkled all along this tragedy. The length, mostly social engagement after social engagement, makes the inevitable downfall at the end that much more powerful.A theme is the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm is the fine food, excellent dress, charades, conversation. The macrocosm is the meat grinder. The dichotomy reminds me of The Mask Of the Red Death but, in Mary Chesnut's Civil War, the macrocosm intrudes into the microcosm with tragic frequency.Some of the characters could be works of fiction. There's the beautiful-in-every-way Buck. (A middle name is Buchanan.) There's the always optimistic Johnny. There's the general who declares it's been the best year of his life, after losing use of one hand and losing a leg entirely. There's Mary's husband, who we think we know until we find there's more and wonder if there is more still.Fives stars for this tough read that leaves me still thinking. We know how much was lost, but how much was retained? That's for you to decide.

I am in the process of reading this book.

Mary was an angry feminist who equated marriage with slavery. She hated the institution of slavery because she did not want to live amongst negroes. Illuminating!

All Good

very good book on the subject , the American Civil war.got into the subject , by watch the serials on t.v . THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR by ken Burns