Mary Boykin Chesnut Bookmark

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March 31, 1823 – November 22, 1886, Confederate Diarist. Mary’s distinguished father, Stephen Decatur Miller – Lawyer, Governor, Congressman – from South Carolina provided her a classical education. At the age of 17 she married US Senator from South Carolina, James Chesnut, Jr. and also became his confidante. …

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March 31, 1823 – November 22, 1886, Confederate Diarist. Mary’s distinguished father, Stephen Decatur Miller – Lawyer, Governor, Congressman – from South Carolina provided her a classical education. At the age of 17 she married US Senator from South Carolina, James Chesnut, Jr. and also became his confidante. Mary followed Secession news closely and began her now famous diary November 8, 1860. Over the next twenty years she wrote constantly compiling 5,000 hand-written pages today known as: A Diary From Dixie

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She died childless and passed her writings to a friend. Her Diary From Dixie was finally published in 1909 and is the most edited of Confederate diaries by Yankee editors as it is most incriminating. Her diary entry of March 17, 1862 states: “Yankees expect to make the war pay. Yankees do not undertake anything that does not pay. They think we belong to them. We have been good milk cows, milked by the tariff…We let them have all our hard earnings. We bore the ban of slavery; they got the money, Cotton pays everybody who handles it, sells it, manufactures it; but it rarely pays the men who make it. Secondhand, the Yankees received the wages of slavery. They grew rich; we grew poor.”