Mary Boykin Chesnut

Born:  March 31, 1823, near Stateburg, South Carolina

Died:  November 22, 1886, Camden, South Carolina

Resting Place:  Knights Hill Cemetery, Camden, South Carolina

Brief History:  Mary Boykin Chesnut, was the wife of James Chesnut, a U.S. senator until South Carolina had seceded who went on to a brigadier generalcy in the Confederate Army and a position as a personal aide to Jefferson Davis. She spent the better part of the next 20 years in Camden and at Mulberry, residing at her husband's family plantation. When James was elected to the Senate in 1858, his wife accompanied him to Washington where she became friends with many politicians who would later become the prominent figures of the Confederacy, among them Varina and Jefferson Davis. Following Lincoln's election, He served as aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and he achieved the rank of general. During the Civil War, Chesnut’s husband was a staff officer, an aide to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, and commanding general of the South Carolina reserves. She accompanied him on his military missions and was often a witness to history-making events. Notably, she was in Charleston during the Battle of Fort Sumter, the first engagement in the war.

She began recording her views and observations on February 15, 1861, and closed her diary on August 2, 1865. As Mary Chesnut describes in her diary, the Chesnuts had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the upper society of the South and government of the Confederacy. The Chesnuts were also family friends of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina Howell. James Chesnut, Sr. died in 1866; his will left his son the use of Mulberry Plantation and Sandy Hill, both of which were encumbered by debt, and 83 slaves by name, who were by then freedmen. The plantations passed on to a male Chesnut descendant, and Mary Boykin Chesnut received almost no income. She also found her husband had many debts related to the estate which he had been unable to clear. Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary on February 18, 1861, and ended it on June 26, 1865. She would write at the outset: “This journal is intended to be entirely objective. My subjective days are over.” Chesnut was an eyewitness to many historic events as she accompanied her husband to significant sites of the American Civil War.