About:
Mary Chesnut's Civil War is a diary written by Mary Chesnut, a well-educated and perceptive woman who was part of the ruling circles of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The book provides insights into the upper echelon society of the South, focusing on the people who managed the war from Richmond, Virginia. Through Chesnut's eyes, readers get a glimpse of the elaborate parties, food, and drink that characterized the Confederacy as it crumbled around them. The diary also delves into Chesnut's relationships with her slaves, offering a unique perspective on the social dynamics of the time.
The book offers a realistic insight into the Civil War era society, showcasing the lives of the elite Southern aristocracy and their experiences during the war. Chesnut's writing style combines snideness, insightfulness, and vulnerability, providing a portrait of a society on the brink of destruction. The editor, C. Vann Woodward, has expertly pieced together and deciphered Chesnut's original text, giving a modern freshness to her accounts of the Civil War's most compelling personalities.
From The Publisher:
Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History
"A feast for Civil War buffs. . . . One of the best firsthand records of the Confederate experience. . . .
Electrifying."—Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"By all odds the best of all Civil War memoirs, and one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts to emerge from that or any other war."—Louis D. Rubin, Jr., New Republic
The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut wrote that she had the luck "always to stumble in on the real show." Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South's headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime's death throes, its moment of high drama in world history.
With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her. In her own circles, the aristocratic, patriarchal, slave-holding Mary Chesnut was a figure of heresy and of paradox: she had a horror of slavery and called herself an abolitionist from early youth.
Edited by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut's Civil War presents a full and reliable edition of Chesnut's journals, restoring her to her rightful place in American history and literature.
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