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Mary Boykin Chesnut was born on her grandparents' estate at Mount Pleasant, South Carolina on March 31, 1823. She learned early about the workings of a plantation by observing her grandmother. Grandmother Miller rose early to assign the cleaning and cooking duties for her servants. Besides keeping the mansion clean and prepared for the frequent guests, Mary's grandmother also took charge of making and mending clothing for the slaves on the plantation. She spent whole days cutting out clothing for the children and assigning sewing to her nine seamstresses. Her grandmother worked with the servants and sewing crew so easily and effectively that Mary was nearly nine years old before she became aware that her grandmother's coworkers were slaves.
Having learned to respect these workers, she thought of them as near equals. Mary learned to read at an early age, probably from her grandmother also. Soon she was using this new-found ability to teach a favorite servant to read. It was illegal in South Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but Mary was a favored grandchild and her grandmother was proud of her ability. In 1831, however, her grandmother died. Mary was twelve years old when the entire family moved to Mississippi, where they owned some other plantations.
Most of the family fell ill, however, and within a year the family had returned to the South Carolina plantation to resume their lives there. Shortly after their return, the family was visited by Mr. Chesnut, owner of a nearby plantation, and his son James. James was twenty-one and had just graduated from Princeton.
James and Mary began a courtship that ended with James proposing to Mary when she was fifteen years old. Her mother and father did not approve of such an early marriage and forced Mary to write a letter of refusal to James. At the time of the proposal and refusal, James was in Europe with his ailing brother (It was the custom of wealthy Americans to sail to Europe for the best medical care if they fell very ill. ) Despite the setback, Mary and James continued their relationship. Two years later Mary's mother, now a widow, relented.
Mary wed James in 1840, beginning her days as Mary Boykin Chesnut. They moved to Mulberry Mississippi, to live with James parents. At Mulberry, however, Colonel James Chesnut and his wife, Mary Cox Chesnut, had been in charge of the estate for twenty-two years before his son James arrived with his new wife, Mary. Every detail of the daily management of the house already had been laid out. Consequently, the new Mrs.
Chesnut found herself with little to do. She even had her own personal maid who answered to her smallest needs. Chesnut described her role at Mulberry: "My dear old maid is as good as gold... [in the morning] she brings water and builds a fire... says sternly "Aint you gwine to git up and first bell for breaks done ring. " Which mandate, if I disregard she lets me sleep as long as I please and brings me Oh!
such a nice breakfast to my bedside. While I loiter over my breakfast she gets my room in what she calls "apple pie" order When I am in my dressing room and bath she sweeps and dusts. It all seems cleaning and getting to rights by magic" Mostly, however, Chesnut's life, like the lives of most plantation women, was filled with entertaining the many visitors and with gossip. Later, as the Civil War swelled around her, Chesnut began a diary in which she wrote down bits of gossip about the neighbors as well as comments on the people she met, including Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, and his wife, Varina, as well as many local politicians and plantation owners. Typical of the tidbits that helped to liven her days on the too-peaceful plantation is this 1861 entry: "Tom River has a horn blown every morning before day to wake up his people.
Dr. Tom and Sally have no clock, so when they hear the horn, they get up and prepare breakfast. Some time ago... they heard the horn, got up and cooked their breakfast and ate it, and still had to wait for day. You can imagine those two sitting by the fire, with little to say, waiting and waiting! The horn had blown at ten o'clock at night for a Negro to take a dose of medicine" Chesnut's contact with the outside world was mostly through her sister and through her own husband.
She supported James in his political ambitions as he became a state legislator and later a United States senator. When in 1860 James resigned following the election of President Abraham Lincoln and returned home, Chesnut joined her husband in support of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. By this time, Chesnut had seen much that made her question the wisdom of slavery. She had objected to an advertisement in the Camden paper selling a slave "so white as to be mistaken for a citizen." And she had seen numbers of light-colored children around many of the neighbor homes.
The sight led her to wonder about how having slave women, who were readily available and viewed as property, might tempt the male slave owners to behave in immoral ways. She had wondered also about the fate of slave women whom she had seen at auctions. Chesnut was strongly affected by these auctions, as shown in her later writing: "South Carolina slave holder as I am, my very soul sickens it is too dreadful" Seeing separate church services for blacks and whites made her question why all "Christians" did not talk to one another. Other things strengthened Chesnut's hatred of slavery.
A friend, Mary Whitherspoon, had returned home unexpectedly to find her slaves having a party and using the plantation silver. Threatened with floggings, the slaves had smothered Whitherspoon to death. At another household a mistreated maid had attempted to poison her master, a respected colonel. In yet another incident, Chesnut noted a slave woman so driven by her master that she took her own baby and waded into a raging river to end their lives and escape her woes. In her diary, Chesnut wondered if it was a sin for a white southern woman to be opposed to slavery.
Part of her dislike for slavery came from her belief that caring for the blacks was unprofitable. She wished the northerners "had the Negroes we the cotton" She also disliked slavery because she thought of slaves as "dirty Africans" and because she was disgusted with the treatment many slaves received Chesnut stayed at the plantation for a few weeks while her husband went directly from his post as a senator in Washington to Columbia, the seat of South Carolina government. Here he participated in the South Carolina Secession Convention and was appointed to a committee to prepare an Ordinance of Secession. An epidemic of smallpox interrupted the convention, however, and it was moved to Char...
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