Mary Chesnut's Civil War Diary: Opium, Revisions and a Contested Pulitzer

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Mary Boykin Chesnut was born in 1823 at Mount Pleasant plantation in South Carolina, the daughter of governor and senator Stephen Decatur Miller, and educated in Charleston at a French school run by refugees from the Haitian Revolution. At 17 she married James Chesnut Jr. and moved to Mulberry Plantation in Camden, where her father-in-law held about 500 enslaved people. Childless and depressed, she used opium and privately condemned the sexual abuse of enslaved women and the silence of white wives about it.

She began her diary on February 18, 1861, and from Charleston, Montgomery, Richmond and Columbia recorded life among Jefferson Davis, Varina Howell Davis, Wade Hampton and John Bell Hood as Confederate confidence wore away. Emancipation and debt left her nearly destitute after James died in 1885. Between 1881 and 1884, after translating French poetry and writing three unpublished novels, she reworked the diary into a narrative. C. Vann Woodward's 1981 edition won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize, while Kenneth Lynn called it a hoax.

Her father left politics and moved the family to three cotton plantations in Mississippi.
Her unpublished novels included The Captain and the Colonel and Manassas.
She entrusted the diary to her friend Isabella D. Martin, leading to a 1905 edition and a 1949 version by Ben Ames Williams.
Her revisions added people to scenes, invented conversations, and inserted reflections written with hindsight.
Mulberry Plantation is now a national historic landmark, its status tied in part to her diary.

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