The Diary of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut

Excerpts from the Paper

The Diary of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
The majority of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut was spent in the anti-bellum (pre-Civil War) south, where slavery was an nearly three century old institution and had a unique inside view of many of the momentous events of history that have shaped American political history for more than one hundred and twenty years after her death. Mrs. Boykin was born in 1823 to a very wealthy and socially connected family in the south and married Joseph Chesnut at the very young age of 17 in 1840 (Chesnut xvi). Her father was a “man of distinction” in South Carolina politics whom was elected to Congress in 1817, later governor in 1828 and served as United States Senator from 1830 to 1833, having to resign due to ill...

.....ng and prolonging its existence. The interesting analogy between the present state of women as wives and the benevolent slave owner is among the more prophetic insights, that would serve as the basis for the woman’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century and the civil rights era of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Works Cited
Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller. A Diary From Dixie: Electronic Edition. Ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, 1905. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Electronic Edition. Text scanned (OCR) by Jordan Davis. Text encoded by Natalia Smith. First edition, 1997. Chapel Hill: Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina, 1997. February 27, 2010. <http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnut/maryches.html>