Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823-1886) captured an intimate view of the political and personal struggles of the Confederate South during the Civil War. Her journal of the war years describes not only the difficulties of war, but also reveals her personal views on the similarities between the system of slavery and the position of women in the South.

The Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Southern woman from a well-to-do political family, provide an in-depth view of the attitudes and experiences of Southerners during the war between the states. After the war Chesnut recognized the literary and historic value of her observations and began to revise her diaries, but only one small excerpt was published during her lifetime. Following her death in 1886, heavily edited versions of her diary were released, and it was not until 1981 that a complete edition of her work appeared. Chesnut's writing is...