2008 Report of Gifts (161 Pages) South Caroliniana Library--University of South Carolina
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University of South Carolina Scholar Commons University South Caroliniana Society - Annual South Caroliniana Library Report of Gifts 4-26-2008 2008 Report of Gifts (161 pages) South Caroliniana Library--University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/scs_anpgm Part of the Library and Information Science Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation University South Caroliniana Society. (2008). "2008 Report of Gifts." Columbia, SC: The ocS iety. This Newsletter is brought to you by the South Caroliniana Library at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in University South Caroliniana Society - Annual Report of Gifts yb an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The The South Carolina South Caroliniana College Library Library 1840 1940 THE UNIVERSITY SOUTH CAROLINIANA SOCIETY SEVENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Saturday, April 26, 2008 Mr. Steve Griffith, President, Presiding Reception and Exhibit .............................. 11:00 a.m. South Caroliniana Library Luncheon .......................................... 1:00 p.m. Capstone Campus Room Business Meeting Welcome Reports of the Executive Council and Secretary-Treasurer Address ................................... Mr. Steve Griffith President, University South Caroliniana Society 2008 Report of Gifts to the Library by Members of the Society Announced at the 72nd Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society (the Friends of the Library) Annual Program 26 April 2008 Mary Boykin Chesnut Writes Between the Lines – 2007 Keynote Address by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld Gifts of Manuscript South Caroliniana Gifts of Printed South Caroliniana Gifts of Pictorial South Caroliniana South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, SC) A special collection documenting all periods of South Carolina history. http://library.sc.edu/socar University of South Carolina Contact - [email protected] 2 Mary Boykin Chesnut Writes Between the Lines by Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld Keynote address presented, 21 April 2007, at the 71st Annual Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society The phone call from Allen Stokes inviting me to give this year’s talk to the South Caroliniana Society touched me deeply. Since my days as a graduate student in the mid-70s, I have understood the South Caroliniana to be my scholarly birthplace. It is a real honor to be here. I came to the University of South Carolina in 1975 as a graduate student in the fledgling Southern Studies Program, then housed in Lieber College, just across The Horseshoe. I remember the Caroliniana as an open and friendly place. Les Inabinett and his staff never failed to answer a query or point out a connection, and in the process not only nurtured my research skills, but taught me what sheer fun it is to work with original materials, and what a privilege it is to be a member of a community of scholars. So I am delighted to speak today. When I began work on Mary Boykin Chesnut as a graduate student, she was to most readers an obscure figure, although since 1905, when a severely truncated edition of her firsthand account of the Confederacy, A Diary from Dixie, was published, she had been a valuable source for historians. Novelist Ben Ames Williams read A Diary from Dixie and was so fascinated that he not only based a central character on Chesnut in his novel House Divided, but subsequently undertook to edit a second edition of her work. Williams’ edition, published in 1949, was far more readable and attracted fresh attention to Chesnut. It contained more of her manuscript material than the 1905 version, but was itself heavily edited. Despite two editions of her work and seventy years of interest by historians, no scholarly work had been done on Chesnut in 1975, apart from an entry by Margaretta P. Childs in Notable American Women and a chapter in Bell Irvin Wiley’s Confederate Women, when in that year C. Vann Woodward undertook a new and complete edition of the Chesnut diaries. Much has happened to Mary Chesnut since then. Her monumental work was finally published in a full scholarly edition entitled Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, and the original journals on which the larger work was based were published three years later as The Private Mary Chesnut: The Original Civil War Journals. A 3 biography appeared in 1981, and two manuscript novels were published in 2002. In 1982, ninety-six years after her death, Chesnut won a Pulitzer Prize. (Well, officially, C. Vann Woodward won the Pulitzer, but it was Mary’s book.) One measure of the growth in her reputation: in 1975, no anthologies of American writers included Mary Chesnut; today it is hard to find one that does not include her. When in the mid-1980s the National Portrait Gallery devoted a gallery to the Civil War, Mary Boykin Chesnut held center stage - the only woman in the room - surrounded by Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Looking her best (in fact, in a very flattering portrait by Samuel Osgood, looking better than her best) - the very paradigm of the Southern lady - Chesnut stood alone among all those powerful men: just the sort of situation she thoroughly enjoyed in life and recorded so happily in her journal. Ken Burns’ award-winning documentary The Civil War featured Chesnut (in the voice of Julie Harris). The U.S. Post Office honored her with a stamp in their Civil War series, along with only two other women, nurses Clara Barton and Phoebe Pember, and an official limited edition Mary Boykin Chesnut doll - very expensive - was produced. In 2001, CSPAN’s American Writers Series included four writers to represent the Civil War era: Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass and Mary Chesnut. When Woodward’s edition and my biography appeared in 1981, there were relatively few published resources available on the lives and thoughts of women of the period, so Chesnut’s work proved to be an early and rich tool for exploring the social history of the Confederacy, women’s roles, and the nexus of private lives with public crisis. In the 25 years since, ground-breaking studies concerned with nineteenth-century women by such scholars as Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Katherine Seidel and Anne G. Rose, all of whom refer frequently to Chesnut, have dramatically increased our understanding of women’s lives. Since my own dissertation on her, five more have been completed, and at least one book-length study is currently under contract. With all the attention Mary Chesnut has garnered in the last twenty-five years, however, most scholars continue to see her primarily as an historical resource. Since I have only a little time today, I thought I might focus instead on the importance of Mary Chesnut as a writer of great significance and power. Thirty years ago, I spent many hours arguing with Vann Woodward that the revised diary 4 is a literary work and should be edited as such. Since then, I have edited not only the original diaries with Woodward but also her two manuscript novels, and I have become increasingly convinced that Chesnut must be read not as one of dozens of women diarists and letter writers of the Civil War era, not even as the best woman diarist, but as one of the best of our nineteenth-century writers, period. As many of you know, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut was born in 1823. Before she was ten, her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, who had already served a term in Congress, would serve as governor of South Carolina and United States senator. Thus, throughout her childhood, politics was in the very air she breathed. At twelve Mary was enrolled in a Charleston boarding school run by an indomitable Frenchwoman, Ann Marson Talvande, where she spoke only French or German during school hours. Madame Talvande, who possessed what Mary later described as “the fiercest eye I have ever seen in a mortal head,” was a strict taskmaster and kept a close watch on her young charges, but thirteen-year-old Mary managed to be seen walking on the Charleston Battery in the moonlight with James Chesnut, Jr., newly graduated from Princeton, and Governor Miller decided to remove his daughter from gossip. He took her for several months to his cotton plantation in rural Mississippi, a state just emerging from frontier status. She returned briefly to Madame Talvande’s school, but her formal schooling was ended abruptly by the death of her father in 1838. Three weeks after her seventeenth birthday in 1840, she married and went to live with James at Mulberry, his family’s plantation near Camden (S.C.). The new Mrs. Chesnut came to Mulberry expecting, in due course, to assume her prescribed role as wife, mother, and mistress of the household—a position for which she had been carefully trained. Fate had other plans. Her in-laws, James Chesnut, Sr., and Mary Cox Chesnut, both in their sixties at the time of her marriage, retained control of lands and household for twenty-five more years. More devastating: James and Mary were childless. Thus, the first twenty years of her marriage were difficult, and her relationships with her in-laws and even her husband were often tense. Hers was a restless, gregarious personality, so she found life at Mulberry stultifying. In later years, she would say of it: “A pleasant, empty, easy going life. If one’s heart is at ease. But people are not like pigs; they cannot be put up and fattened. So here I pine and fret.” 5 James Chesnut, Jr., spent the years before 1860 in public service. In 1858 he was sent to the United States Senate. In Washington, finally, his wife was in her element.