Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 18, 1865

A feeling of sadness hovers over me now, day and night, which no words of mine can express. There is a chance for plenty of character study in this Mulberry house, if one only had the heart for it. Colonel Chesnnt, 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. His manners are unequaled still, but underneath this smooth exterior lies the grip of a tyrant whose will has never been crossed. I will not attempt what Lord Byron says he could not do, but must quote again: “Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees him. I have never met a man who could describe one.” We have had three very distinct specimens of the genus in this house—three generations of gentlemen, each utterly different from the other — father, son, and grandson.

African Scipio walks at Colonel Chesnut's side. He is six feet two, a black Hercules, and as gentle as a dove in all his dealings with the blind old master, who boldly strides forward, striking with his stick to feel where he is going. The Yankees left Scipio unmolested. He told them he was absolutely essential to his old master, and they said, “If you want to stay so bad, he must have been good to you always.” Skip says he was silent, for it “made them mad if you praised your master.”

Sometimes this old man will stop himself, just as he is going off in a fury, because they try to prevent his attempting some feat impossible in his condition of lost faculties. He will ask gently, “I hope that I never say or do anything unseemly! Sometimes I think I am subject to mental aberrations.” At every footfall he calls out, “Who goes there?” If a lady's name is given he uncovers and stands, with hat off, until she passes. He still has the old-world art of bowing low and gracefully.

Colonel Chesnut came of a race that would brook no interference with their own sweet will by man, woman, or devil. But then such manners has he, they would clear any man's character, if it needed it. Mrs. Chesnut, his wife, used to tell us that when she met him at Princeton, in the nineties of the eighteenth century, they called him “the Young Prince.” He and Mr. John Taylor,¹ of Columbia, were the first up-country youths whose parents were wealthy enough to send them off to college.

When a college was established in South Carolina, Colonel John Chesnut, the father of the aforesaid Young Prince, was on the first board of trustees. Indeed, I may say that, since the Revolution of 1776, there has been no convocation of the notables of South Carolina, in times of peace and prosperity, or of war and adversity, in which a representative man of this family has not appeared. The estate has been kept together until now. Mrs. Chesnut said she drove down from Philadelphia on her bridal trip, in a chariot and four — a cream-colored chariot with outriders.

They have a saying here — on account of the large families with which people are usually blessed, and the subdivision of property consequent upon that fact, besides the tendency of one generation to make and to save, and the next to idle and to squander, that there are rarely more than three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves. But these Chesnuts have secured four, from the John Chesnut who was driven out from his father's farm in Virginia by the French and Indians, when that father had been killed at Fort Duquesne,² to the John Chesnut who saunters along here now, the very perfection of a lazy gentleman, who cares not to move unless it be for a fight, a dance, or a fox-hunt.

The first comer of that name to this State was a lad when he arrived after leaving his land in Virginia; and being without fortune otherwise, he went into Joseph Kershaw's grocery shop as a clerk, and the Kershaws, I think, so remember that fact that they have it on their coat-of-arms. Our Johnny, as he was driving me down to Mulberry yesterday, declared himself delighted with the fact that the present Joseph Kershaw had so distinguished himself in our war, that they might let the shop of a hundred years ago rest for a while. '”Upon my soul,” cried the cool captain, “I have a desire to go in there and look at the Kershaw tombstones. I am sure they have put it on their marble tablets that we had an ancestor one day a hundred years ago who was a clerk in their shop.” This clerk became a captain in the Revolution.

In the second generation the shop had so far sunk that the John Chesnut of that day refused to let his daughter marry a handsome, dissipated Kershaw, and she, a spoiled beauty, who could not endure to obey orders when they were disagreeable to her, went up to her room and therein remained, never once coming out of it for forty years. Her father let her have her own way in that; he provided servants to wait upon her and every conceivable luxury that she desired, but neither party would give in.

I am, too, thankful that I am an old woman, forty-two my last birthday. There is so little life left in me now to be embittered by this agony. “Nonsense! I am a pauper,” says my husband, “and I am as smiling and as comfortable as ever you saw me.” “When you have to give up your horses? How then?”

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¹ John Taylor was graduated from Princeton in 1790 and became a planter in South Carolina. He served in Congress from 1806 to 1810, and in the latter year was chosen to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, caused by the resignation of Thomas Sumter. In 1826 he was chosen Governor of South Carolina. He died in 1832.

¹ Fort Duquesne stood at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany Rivers. Captain Trent, acting for the Ohio Company, with some Virginia militiamen, began to build this fort in February, 1754. On April 17th of the same year, 700 Canadians and French forced him to abandon the work. The French then completed the fortress and named it Fort Duquesne. The unfortunate expedition of General Braddock, in the summer of 1755, was an attempt to retake the fort, Braddock's defeat occurring eight miles east of it. In 1758 General Forbes marched westward from Philadelphia and secured possession of the place, after the French, alarmed at his approach, had burned it. Forbes gave it the name of Pittsburg.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 390-3

The Government of God

Society is of God, as well as nature and religion.  Man has received his life from the Creator, and no one has the right to take it from him, unless he is a violator of the most precious rights and privileges he has conferred upon him. – Even the Guilty and the wicked should not suffer the extremity of the law, but for crimes involving the life and peace of society.  No one has the right to shed the blood of his fellow, unless for reasons the highest and most sacred, derived from the word of God and the original constitution of our nature.  Government holds a sword, and that sword is the gift of God.  Without it, society would be exposed to the lawlessness of the unprincipled and base, and would be like a human body without arms.  God has the power to take away human life, as he does by sickness, famine, and death; and he has put the sword into the hands of human governments, to be used when the necessity of the case demands it.

He is called the Lord of hosts, or armies, and the reason is, that among the heathen the nation most successful in arms was supposed to have the most powerful God!  Jehovah entered the lists against the Lords many and Gods many of the idolatrous nations, and was always successful, when his chosen people, the Jews, cast themselves upon his arm, and thereby proved the eternal sovereignty.

The history of the struggles of the Revolution shows the special care of Providence over our great leader, Washington.  He rode in the thickest of the fight, and was never injured.  Four bullets made as many holes in his coat, and two horses fell dead under him in a single battle, yet he escaped without a wound.  He, himself, regarded it as a special interposition of the hand of God.

The following incident is reported of him:  In the battle of Monongahela – the defeat of Braddock – a distinguished warrior swore it was impossible to bring Washington down by a bullet.  His reason was, that he had taken steady aim at Washington seventeen times, but could not once hit him, and he gave up believing he was invulnerable.  Washington’s work was not then completed.  An unseen hand defended him; and every soldier is under the special care of Him, who recognizes His authority.  Let every one who goes out to defend the sacred rights of his country, look to God for aid and counsel.  He is a present help – a refuge in distress.  If he fall in battle, he falls in a good cause; and even the more wicked and desperate are cut off from the evil to come, and are saved from additional years of crime and guilt.  God does not permit war to be an undeserved and lasting injury to any one.

War should lead us to look to god as the Supreme Arbiter and Judge of nations, and make us feel our dependence upon Him, at home and in the field of battle.  Each father and mother, who has sent a son into battle, should pray as Moses did for Judah:  “Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah, and bring him unto his people.  Let his hand be sufficient for him; and be thou an help to him from his enemies.”  Let every warrior, like Judah, call upon the Lord; and let every parent and friend remember Judah on the field of battle.

God uses war as a purifier of the world.  It is often the scourge of a nation’s wickedness and impiety.  It makes the proudest heart to quail, and humble itself under his mighty hand.  It shows how vain is the help of man.  The neglect of a single officer may turn the tide of war against us, and after a successful campaign, bring us into unexpected disasters.  God is now reminding us of His authority, and teaching the nation that not in statesmen, nor in captains or great generals, but in Him alone there is ever-lasting strength.

The following incident is recorded in a private letter from Ft. Donelson by a soldier in the fifteenth Illinois regiment:

I visited the battle-field on the day of the surrender; here indeed can one truly see the “horrors of war.”  I would not sicken you by detailing the horrible sights I witnessed, but I cannot refrain from mentioning one incident.  In passing among the wounded and dead of the enemy, I came to the body of a young man, lying partly on his side; he belonged to the Second Kentucky Regiment, and was an exceedingly handsome man.  It was the expression of his face, so different from the rest, which first attracted my attention.  One of his hands rested upon his breast just beneath his coat; slightly removing this, I discovered the cause of that expression: tightly grasped in his hand was a Bible.  My curiosity was so great that I could not resist the temptation of learning his name, but it was with no little difficulty that I succeeded in obtaining it, so tightly had his fingers stiffened in their grasp.  I opened the book, and on the fly leaf was written: “Presented to Robert Reeves by his affectionate mother,” and then immediately beneath these words were “My dear son, when troubles and temptations assail you, here alone can you find comfort and consolation.”  What a consolation would it be to her poor heart if, when she hears of the death of her dear son, could she but know that ’midst the din and roar of battle, and with death slowly but surely creeping over him, he had sought and found that comfort and consolation in the teachings of a redeeming Savior.  * *

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Monday Morning, May 5, 1862, p. 2