Mary Chesnut's Civil War by C. Vann Woodward

James Chesnut quickly resigned from the Senate and played an important role in drafting the South Carolina ordinance of secession. In 1860, Mary Chesnut traveled to Florida to see her sister and was on the return journey when she heard of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency. senator in the 1850s, during the sectionalism crisis that led to the Civil War. James was one of South Carolina’s most influential politicians and served as a U.S. In April 1840, Mary married the wealthy James Chesnut, Jr., a Princeton graduate, and the two settled at his family home, Mulberry, outside Camden, South Carolina. Mary Chesnut, pictured here in a photograph from the 1860s, was an elite Southern woman who documented her experience of the war in a diary.

She was a celebrated beauty in Charleston society who traveled widely throughout the United States during the antebellum years, including to the American West and New Orleans. As the daughter of an elite southerner, Chesnut was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, at Madame Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies. Her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, was a politician who promoted states’ rights and argued in favor of the position – held by other southerners such as John Calhoun – that slavery was a “positive good.” Miller became governor of South Carolina in 1828 and a U.S. Mary Boykin Chesnut was born Mary Boykin Miller on March 31, 1823, in South Carolina. Use this Narrative alongside the Women during the Civil War Narrative to allow students to analyze and compare women’s experiences during the Civil War.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War by C. Vann Woodward