Mary Boykin Chesnut

A member of a leading Charleston family, Mrs. James Chesnut lived at the summit of the Southern landowning aristocracy. In the autumn of 1860, her father-in-law became the first Southern politician to resign from the U.S. Senate; at the start of the war her husband was serving as an aide to General Beauregard, who gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter. She was well acquainted with South Carolina politicians, judges, governors, and businessmen, and after the war began she took great interest in the Confederacy's military tactics, hearing much of it firsthand from the generals and civilian leaders who put that strategy in place.

Through it all, Mary Boykin Chesnut faithfully kept a diary which has become one of the best-known eyewitness documents to the Southern experience of the Civil War...