Mary Chesnut, Diarist

For those seeking the annotated version edited by C. Vann Woodward, they should be aware it is heavily footnoted, and an excellent review source. But if someone does not like to read the finer details and just the storyline, I would recommend '1949' edition.
Lubliner.
 
Another interesting Mary Chesnut quote:

"I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true. Men & women are punished when their masters & mistresses are brutes & not when they do wrong -- & then we live surrounded by prostitutes. An abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or Mulatto woman for being a thing we can't name. God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system & wrong & iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad. This is only what I see: like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children -- & every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think -- Good women we have, but they talk of nastiness tho they never do wrong; they talk day & night of -- My disgust sometimes is boiling over-but they are, I believe, in conduct the purest women God ever made. Thank God for my countrywomen -- alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.

"My mother-in-law told me when I was first married not to send my female servants in the street on errands. They were there tempted, led astray -- & then she said placidly, 'So they told me when I came here -- & I was very particular, but you see with what result.' Mr. Harris said it was so patriarchal. So it is -- flocks & herds & slaves -- & wife Leah does not suffice. Rachel must be added, if not married & all the time they seem to think themselves patterns -- models of husbands & fathers."

Mary was opposed to slavery because she saw it as degrading to white society -- as, indeed, it was.

jno

Very similar commentary appears in Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation.

A 1863 version of Journal is free at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12422/12422-h/12422-h.htm
 
in her writing she not only that was opposed to slavary but the majority of the women that she knew were also opposed to it.

As they should have been, if for no other reason than slavery provided their husbands in-house concubines. On the other hand, in a time when fewer marriages were the result of courtship, romance and love for their intended, and wives were themselves in many ways 'property' of their husbands, perhaps white women of means welcomed the 'outlet' slave women provided their husbands, disgusting as that seems.
 
For those seeking the annotated version edited by C. Vann Woodward, they should be aware it is heavily footnoted, and an excellent review source. But if someone does not like to read the finer details and just the storyline, I would recommend '1949' edition.
Lubliner.

I read the annotated version. Aside from having to go back and forth between the footnotes and the narrative, I would certainly recommend it.
 
You begin to feel like you know the people she wrote about with such affection. In the final third of the book, when page after page had contain the deaths of those people, it was very personal in a way that is hard to explain. My wife, who identified with the Southern ladies, teared up. Mary Chestnut's emotional honesty has a lot to do with that.
 
I've only read bits & pieces when they appeared in other books. Reading this thread maybe I should get a hold of her diary.
To those who have read/studied her a question. Do you think her expressions in writing correctly captured the reasons why the Confederacy fought on knowing it was defeated?
 
I've only read bits & pieces when they appeared in other books. Reading this thread maybe I should get a hold of her diary.
To those who have read/studied her a question. Do you think her expressions in writing correctly captured the reasons why the Confederacy fought on knowing it was defeated?

I think she saw it as a mans war and so it was hard for her to understand what the menfolk thought they were up to. She early on thought the more vociferous sucessionists to be a little 'out there". She was definitely patriotic but as the cost and pain increased she found it hard to believe in much of anything. And being in a patriarchal world she felt some things in common with her slaves. She had complex thoughts
 
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