Wife of a South Carolina senator who became an aide to Jefferson Davis, Chesnut kept a diary from Lincoln’s election in 1860 through the collapse of the Confederacy. She records the firing on Fort Sumter, the making of the Confederate government at Montgomery, wartime Richmond and the gossip, fear and grief of the Southern elite; she writes as a member of the slaveholding class she belonged to.
The most quoted civilian record of the Confederacy, sharp-tongued and indispensable to students of the Civil War. Download the free EPUB.