“Mrs. Chesnut’s anguish when her husband died, is not to be forgotten; the ‘bitter cry’ never quite spent itself, though she was brave and bright to the end. Her friends were near in that supreme moment at Sarsfield, when, on November 22, 1886, her own heart ceased to beat. Her servants had been true to her; no blandishments of freedom had drawn Ellen or Molly away from ‘Miss Mary.’ Mrs. Chesnut lies buried in the family cemetery at Knight’s Hill, where also sleep her husband and many other members of the Chesnut family.”

The Chesnuts settled in South Carolina at the close of the war with France, but lived originally on the frontier of Virginia. Their Virginia home had been invaded by French and Indians, and in an expedition to Fort Duquesne the father was killed. John Chesnut removed from Virginia to South Carolina soon afterward and served in the Revolution as a captain. His son James, the “Old Colonel,” was educated at Princeton, took an active part in public affairs in South Carolina, and prospered greatly as a planter. He survived until after the War, being a nonogenarian when the conflict closed. In a charming sketch of him in one of the closing pages of this Diary, occurs the following passage: “Colonel Chesnut, now ninety-three, blind and deaf, is apparently as strong as ever, and certainly as resolute of will. Partly patriarch, partly grand seigneur, this old man is of a species that we shall see no more; the last of a race of lordly planters who ruled this Southern world, but now a splendid wreck.”

Three miles from Camden still stands Mulberry. During one of the raids committed in the neighborhood by Sherman’s men early in 1865, the house escaped destruction almost as if by accident. The picture of it in this book is from a recent photograph. A change has indeed come over it, since the days when the household servants and dependents numbered between sixty and seventy, and its owner was lord of a thousand slaves. After the war, Mulberry ceased to be the author’s home, she and General Chesnut building for themselves another to which they gave the name of Sarsfield. Sarsfield, of which an illustration is given, still stands in the pine lands not far from Mulberry. Bloomsbury, another of old Colonel Chesnut’s plantation dwellings, survived the march of Sherman, and is now the home of David R. Williams, Jr., and Ellen Manning, his wife, whose children roam its halls, as grandchildren of the author’s sister Kate. Other Chesnut plantations were Cool Spring, Knight’s Hill, The Hermitage, and Sandy Hill.

The Diary, as it now exists in forty-eight thin volumes, of the small quarto size, is entirely in Mrs. Chesnut’s handwriting. She originally wrote it on what was known as “Confederate paper,” but transcribed it afterward. When Richmond was threatened, or when Sherman was coming, she buried it or in some other way secreted it from the enemy. On occasion it shared its hiding-place with family silver, or with a drinking-cup which had been presented to General Hood by the ladies of Richmond. Mrs. Chesnut was fond of inserting on blank pages of the Diary current newspaper accounts of campaigns and battles, or lists of killed and wounded. One item of this kind, a newspaper “extra,” issued in Chester, S. C., and announcing the assassination of Lincoln, is reproduced in this volume.

Mrs. Chesnut, by oral and written bequest, gave the Diary to her friend whose name leads the signatures to this Introduction. In the Diary, here and there, Mrs. Chesnut’s expectation that the work would some day be printed is disclosed, but at the time of her death it did not seem wise to undertake publication for a considerable period. Yellow with age as the pages now are, the only harm that has come to them in the passing of many years, is that a few corners have been broken and frayed, as shown in one of the pages here reproduced in facsimile.

In the summer of 1904, the woman whose office it has been to assist in preparing the Diary for the press, went South to collect material for another work to follow her A Virginia Girl in the Civil War. Her investigations led her to Columbia, where, while the guest of Miss Martin, she learned of the Diary’s existence. Soon afterward an arrangement was made with her publishers under which the Diary’s owner and herself agreed to condense and revise the manuscript for publication. The Diary was found to be of too great length for reproduction in full, parts of it being of personal or local interest rather than general. The editing of the book called also for the insertion of a considerable number of foot-notes, in order that persons named, or events referred to, might be the better understood by the present generation.

Mrs. Chesnut was a conspicuous example of the well-born and high-bred woman, who, with active sympathy and unremitting courage, supported the Southern cause. Born and reared when Nullification was in the ascendent, and acquiring an education which developed and refined her natural literary gifts, she found in the throes of a great conflict at arms the impulse which wrought into vital expression in words her steadfast loyalty to the waning fortunes of a political faith, which, in South Carolina, had become a religion.

Many men have produced narratives of the war between the States, and a few women have written notable chronicles of it; but none has given to the world a record more radiant than hers, or one more passionately sincere. Every line in this Diary throbs with the tumult of deep spiritual passion, and bespeaks the luminous mind, the unconquered soul, of the woman who wrote it.

Isabella D. Martin,
Myrta Lockett Avary.