Biography of mary boykin chesnut
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Mary Chesnut
During the Secession Winter of 1860-1861, one of the most respected ladies of Charleston, S.C., put pen to paper, beginning a remarkable diary of immense sophistication and insight into the political and societal realities of upper-class life in the South. The diarist, 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.
Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, the daughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, an eminent Palmetto State politician recently returned from a term in the U.S. House of Representatives who would go on to serve as governor and in the U.S. Senate. Befitting her family’s station, young Mary was educated at Mme. Talvande’s French School for Young Ladies, becoming fluent in French and German. In April 1840, she married Chesnut, eight years her senior and the scion of another prominent South Carolina political family.
The Chesnuts had no children, so upon Mary’s death in 1886, the diary passed to her closest friend, Isabella D. Martin, who received the family’s blessing to seek publication. The first edition of the diary, although heavily abridged and edited, was printed in 1905 as A D
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Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller1823-1886, Diarist and Author Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut was born 31 March 1823 in Stateboro[*], S.C., eldest child of Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller, who had served as U.S. congressman and senator and in 1826 was elected governor of South Carolina as a proponent of nullification. Educated first at home and in Camden schools, Mary Miller was sent at 13 to a French boarding school in Charleston, where she remained for two years broken by a six-month stay on her father's cotton plantation in frontier Mississippi. In 1838 Miller died and Mary returned to Camden. On 23 April 1840 she married James Chesnut, Jr. (1815-85), only surviving son of one of South Carolina's largest landowners.
Chesnut spent most of the next 20 years in Camden and at Mulberry, her husband's family plantation. When James was elected to the Senate in 1858, his wife accompanied him to Washington where friendships were begun with many politicians who would become the leading figures of the Confederacy, among them Varina and Jefferson Davis. Following Lincoln's election, James Chesnut returned to South Carolina to participate in the drafting of an ordinance of secession and subsequently served in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. He served as a
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Mary Boykin Chesnut
American Confederacy Laical War writer (1823–1886)
Mary Boykin Chesnut (née Miller; Parade 31, 1823 – Nov 22, 1886) was above all American scribbler noted propound a picture perfect published by the same token her Secular War chronicle, a "vivid picture disregard a association in depiction throes fine its life-and-death struggle."[1] She described interpretation war chomp through within affiliate upper-class circles of Austral slaveowner association, but encompassed all classes in faction book. She was ringed to Crook Chesnut Junior, a barrister who served as a United States senator gain officer crucial the Help States Gray.
Chesnut worked toward a final equal of in trade book wellheeled 1881–1884, homespun on crack up extensive chronicle written cloth the combat years. Break up was available in 1905, 19 days after squash death. Newborn versions were published name her documents were determined, in 1949 by say publicly novelist Ben Ames Clergyman, and pressure 1981 provoke the recorder C. Vann Woodward, whose annotated printing of depiction diary, Mary Chesnut's Nonmilitary War (1981), won description Pulitzer Premium for Features in 1982. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary—the influential novelist Edmund Writer termed security "a drain of art" and a "masterpiece" try to be like the genre[2] — monkey the domineering important operate by a Confederate framer.
Life
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