COASTAL HERITAGE VOLUME 25, NUMBER 3 SPRING 2011 Carolina Diarist The Broken World of Mary Chesnut SPRING 2011 • 1 3 CAROLINA DIARIST: THE BROKEN WORLD OF MARY CHESNUT Her compelling journal describes the four-year Science Serving South Carolina’s Coast Confederate rebellion, which aimed to preserve slavery but led to its extinction in North America. Coastal Heritage is a quarterly publication of the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, a university- based network supporting research, education, 13 and outreach to conserve coastal resources and enhance economic opportunity for the people A RICH Man’s WAR, A POOR Man’s fight of South Carolina. Comments regarding this or future issues of Coastal Heritage are welcome at Why did poor Confederates fight? [email protected]. Subscriptions are free upon request by contacting: 14 S.C. Sea Grant Consortium 287 Meeting Street NEWS AND NOTES Charleston, S.C. 29401 • University of South Carolina student awarded Knauss fellowship phone: (843) 953-2078 • College of Charleston student secures research fellowship e-mail: [email protected] • Litter cleanup a success Executive Director • Blue crab populations decline in saltier water M. Richard DeVoe Director of Communications 16 Susan Ferris Hill Editor EBBS AND FLOWS John H. Tibbetts • 2011 National Aquaculture Extension Conference • Coastal Zone 2011 Art Director th Sara Dwyer • 4 National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration Sara Dwyer Design, LLC Board of Directors The Consortium’s Board of Directors is composed of the chief executive officers of its member institutions: Dr. Raymond S. Greenberg, Chair President, Medical University of South Carolina James F. Barker President, Clemson University Dr. David A. DeCenzo President, Coastal Carolina University Dr. P. George Benson President, College of Charleston John E. Frampton ON THE COVER: Executive Director S.C. Department of Natural Resources Mary Chesnut belonged to the slaveholding southern elite but hated slavery. PHOTO/THE GRANGER COLLECTION Dr. George E. Cooper BACKGROUND IMAGE/SOUTH CAROLINIANA LIBRARY, President, S.C. State University UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Lt. General John W. Rosa President, The Citadel Dr. Harris Pastides President, University of South Carolina COPYRIGHT © 2011 by the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium. All rights reserved. 2 • COASTAL HERITAGE PERSPECTIVE. Photographed with her husband, James, in 1840, Mary Chesnut became the Confederacy’s most brilliant chronicler. PHOTO/THE GRANGER COLLECTION Carolina Diarist The Broken World of Mary Chesnut by John H. Tibbetts ary Chesnut studied her and as profoundly indifferent. So are ern femininity (“Our women are soft Mfamily’s slaves while Fort they all. They carry it too far. You and sweet—low-toned, indolent, Sumter burned a few miles away in could not tell that they even hear the graceful, quiescent.”), but at times she Charleston Harbor. In the predawn awful row that is going on in the bay, couldn’t meet her own standards of hours of April 12, 1861—150 years though it is dinning in their ears day ladylike comportment. Mary Chesnut, ago—Confederate batteries thundered and night. And people talk before when provoked, could be hot-tempered down shells on federal troops bun- them as if they were chairs and tables. and sarcastic, but in public she held kered in the fort. And they make no sign. Are they her tongue on one subject—slavery. In her celebrated Civil War jour- stolidly stupid or wiser than we, silent Although her wealth and privilege nal, Mary Chesnut wondered what her and strong, biding their time?” were built on slavery, she loathed the family’s slaves were thinking and Over the next four years of war, South’s peculiar institution. feeling. Did they know that the new Mary tried to plumb the mysteries of “God, forgive us but ours is a Confederate government claimed Fort Africans who surrounded her, but they monstrous system, and wrong and Sumter? Did they hear freedom in remained inscrutable. Their apparent iniquity,” she wrote in a March 1861 those booming cannons? self-control troubled her. Did they plan entry. “Not by one word or look can we to rebel? Flee north? “Their faces,” she An aristocratic insider living in detect any change in the demeanor of wrote, “are as unreadable as the the heart of the Confederacy, Mary these negro servants,” Mary wrote. sphinx.” Chesnut was the daughter and the “Laurence [her husband’s valet] sits at Mary Chesnut was not always wife of U.S. senators from South our door, as sleepy and as respectful composed herself. She extolled south- Carolina who argued for states’ rights SPRING 2011 • 3 over slavery. slaves. The Confederacy, meanwhile, Charleston, the capital of southern During South Carolina’s sesqui- was desperate for additional troops. extremism, all 169 delegates voted for centennial commemorations of the Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary: “We secession. South Carolina became the Civil War, there is no better time to have lost nearly all of our men, and we first southern state to leave the Union, acknowledge the greatest literary work have no money . Our best and eventually followed by 10 more. of the Confederacy—Mary Chesnut’s brightest are under the sod.” In February 1861, South Carolina journal of 1861-1865, which she later Confederate leaders at times joined the new Confederate States of expanded into an epic of 400,000 considered enlisting slaves and offering America. And two months later, in words. them emancipation as a reward. But April, the Confederacy began the Her book offers insights about the that idea was quickly discarded. Civil War by firing on Fort Sumter. planter elite who overwhelmingly According to southern doctrine, black Serving as an aide to Confederate dominated South Carolina politics and men—free or slave—lacked the cour- General P.G.T. Beauregard, James culture, leading the state into secession age and intelligence to cope with the Chesnut, Jr., set out at night across the and catastrophic war. It drives home demands of disciplined military action. harbor to relay evacuation demands to (sometimes intentionally, sometimes One Confederate leader, Howell Major Robert Anderson of the fort’s not) the moral and intellectual failures Cobb, put it bluntly, “The day you occupying Union force. Anderson of the southern master class. make soldiers of them is the beginning refused to surrender, and Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s diary illuminates of the end of the revolution. If slaves after consulting with his superiors, will make good soldiers, our whole gave orders to open fire. theory of slavery is wrong.” “I knew my husband was rowing The southern secession crisis was about in a boat somewhere in that sparked on November 6, 1860, when dark bay,” Mrs. Chesnut wrote. “And Abraham Lincoln, nominee of the that the shells were roofing it over— anti-slavery Republican Party, was bursting toward the fort.” Mary, dread- elected president. South Carolina’s ing war, made reference to elite, believing that slavery was directly Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Scottish threatened, responded almost immedi- king who killed for power in a blood- ately. Mary’s husband, James Chesnut, bath that ended with his death: Jr., was the first U.S. senator in the “Sound and fury, signifying nothing. A South to resign in protest. delusion and a snare.” In Columbia, the S.C. General After a day and half of shelling, Assembly remained in session and Major Anderson surrendered the fort, called for elections to a state secession and no one was killed—a bloodless Mary Chesnut wrote her original convention. On December 20, 1860, in battle in what would prove to be diary during the Civil War and extensively revised it years later. PHOTO/SOUTH CAROLINIANA LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA the great irony of the rebellion. Southern secession hastened events that the rebels had initiated the war to prevent, events that the planter elite most feared—slave emancipation and the arming of black men. Confederates fought their revolution of 1861-1865 against the Union for one goal: to sustain mastery of the white over the black. The Civil War, however, un- leashed energies among black Americans that had been suppressed for many generations. By 1864, Union armies had BESIEGED. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter, Mary Chesnut swelled with black soldiers, the large worried about her husband in a “boat somewhere in that dark bay.” majority of whom were emancipated IMAGE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 4 • COASTAL HERITAGE America’s bloodiest war. that occurred years before, adding Mary Chesnut and her husband details apparently from memory. lived among the South’s political and Her journal was published in 1905 military elite in Richmond, Virginia, and 1949 in aggressively edited ver- the Confederate capital, during a long sions. Finally, in 1981, a full scholarly stretch of the Civil War. James began edition by historian C. Vann the war as a colonel and served as an Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, aide to Confederate President Jefferson was published in a massive volume of Davis, and later was promoted to 835 pages. It drew on her original brigadier general. The Chesnuts also journal and her many revisions, addi- entertained the southern elite at their tions, and emendations. Nearly a family’s plantations near Camden century after Mary Chesnut’s death, where 450 slaves lived and worked. readers for the first time gained a full The Chesnuts belonged to the picture of this talented, morally torn planter aristocracy that ruled the Deep South Carolinian living at the center South with unchallenged authority, of Confederate power, and her book and her diary captures their finer won a Pulitzer Prize. qualities—elegance, playfulness, In Mary Chesnut’s original 1860s physical bravery, and wit—but also journal, she is a woman of relatively their hubris and self-absorption.