Mary Chesnut Quotes

Is any thing worth it? This fearful sacrifice—this awful penalty we pay for war? —Mary Boykin Chesnut, journal, July 26, 1864

I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we get all the opprobrium of slavery while they, with their tariff, get the money there is in it.

We try our soldiers to see if they are hot enough before we enlist them. If, when water is thrown on them they do not sizz, they won’t do; their patriotism is too cool.

Every one I talk to is in favor of putting negroes in the army and that immediately … I think slavery is now gone and what little there is left of it should be rendered as serviceable as possible.” For her part, Mary Chesnut lamented, “If we had only freed the negroes at first and put them in the army—that would have trumped [the Union’s] trick.

I hope some cool-headed white men will make the Negroes save the rice for us. It is so much needed. They say it might have been done at Port Royal with a little more energy.

Not only did some slaves vow to protect their “white folks,” as though the imminent arrival of the Yankees required a reaffirmation of loyalty, but they did what they could to ensure their safety. Preparing for the Union soldiers, a maid in Mary Chesnut’s household urged her mistress to burn the diary she had been keeping lest it fall into the hands of the enemy. During the siege of Vicksburg, Mary Ann Loughborough, along with her daughter and servants, took refuge in a cave and remained there during the Yankee bombardment; one of the servants stood guard, gun in hand, assuring his mistress that anyone who entered “would have to go over his body first.

When we read of the battles in India, in Italy, in the Crimea, what did we care? It was only an interesting topic, like any other, to look for in the paper. Now, you hear of a battle with a thrill and a shudder. It has come home to us ... A telegram comes to you and you leave it on your lap. You are pale with fright... How many, many of your friends or loved ones this scrap of paper may tell you have gone to their death.

Old Colonel Chesnut came for us. When the train stopped, Quashie, shiny black, was seen on his box, as glossy and perfect in his way as his blooded bays, but the old colonel would stop and pick up the dirtiest little Negro I ever saw who was crying by the roadside. This ragged little black urchin was made to climb up and sit beside Quash. It spoilt the symmetry of the turn-out, but it was a character touch, and the old gentleman knows no law but his own will. He had a biscuit in his pocket which he gave this sniffling little Negro, who proved to be his man Scip’s son. I

Ellen was born when her mother was eighteen years old. The paternity of a mixed-race child was a matter often avoided or denied in households like the Smiths’. As a contemporary, Mary Boykin Chesnut expressed famously, “the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the White children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.” The paternity of Maria’s child, however, was so unmistakable that it was often presumed, and the lady of the house made sure that both Maria and Ellen suffered for it.