“God, forgive us but ours is a monstrous system, and wrong and iniquity,” she wrote in a March 1861 entry.Īn aristocratic insider living in the heart of the Confederacy, Mary Chesnut was the daughter and the wife of U.S. Although her wealth and privilege were built on slavery, she loathed the South’s peculiar institution. Mary Chesnut, when provoked, could be hot-tempered and sarcastic, but in public she held her tongue on one subject-slavery. She extolled southern femininity (“Our women are soft and sweet-low-toned, indolent, graceful, quiescent.”), but at times she couldn’t meet her own standards of ladylike comportment. Mary Chesnut was not always composed herself. Did they plan to rebel? Flee north? “Their faces,” she wrote, “are as unreadable as the sphinx.” Their apparent self-control troubled her. Over the next four years of war, Mary tried to plumb the mysteries of Africans who surrounded her, but they remained inscrutable.
Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we, silent and strong, biding their time?” And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. You could not tell that they even hear the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears day and night. “Laurence sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants,” Mary wrote. Did they know that the new Confederate government claimed Fort Sumter? Did they hear freedom in those booming cannons? In her celebrated Civil War journal, Mary Chesnut wondered what her family’s slaves were thinking and feeling. In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861-150 years ago-Confederate batteries thundered down shells on federal troops bunkered in the fort. Mary Chesnut studied her family’s slaves while Fort Sumter burned a few miles away in Charleston Harbor. Carolina Diarist: The Broken World of Mary Chesnut
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