CHARLESTON

Placing the Knife

NOVEMBER 22

FOR MARY CHESNUT IN CHARLESTON, LINCOLN’S ELECTION WAS DEEPLY troubling. She sensed that suddenly the tension in the nation had become something more than mere North-South rivalry. To her, his election augured war.

She learned of it on a train as she traveled back to South Carolina after visiting her sister in Florida, a sojourn she described as “two weeks amid hammocks and everglades oppressed and miserable.” Word spread through “the cars,” as rail coaches were called, that “Lincoln was elected and our fate sealed.” Certain that momentous events lay ahead, she began keeping her diary. She made her first entries on loose paper, then acquired her bound book. The diary was for herself for now and would be kept secure. Even her husband, especially her husband, would not see it.

“I do not allow myself vain regrets or sad foreboding,” she wrote in the first sentence of what would be a four-and-a-half-year, four-hundred-thousand-word endeavor. “This southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination—and cool brains. We have risked all, and we must play our best for the stake is life or death.”

During her journey she had also learned that her husband, U.S. senator James Chesnut, had resigned his seat to protest Lincoln’s election and to more firmly ally himself with South Carolina’s drive for secession. He had done so against her wishes, but she was unable to stop him. “Alas I was in Florida,” she wrote. “I might not have been able to influence him—but I should have tried.” She wished her husband was more ambitious, more great, really, than his nature appeared to allow. “If I had been a man in this great revolution,” she wrote, “—I should have either been killed at once or made a name and done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would be mine—Victory or Westminster Abbey”—meaning a tomb under the floor. She had the ambition that he lacked, and she sought to exercise it through him. It was something of a curse, she acknowledged, not a source of delight and satisfaction. In one diary entry she wailed, “Why was I born so frightfully ambitious?”

Mary was thirty-seven. She and James had no children, though they had tried. They lived on a vast plantation called Mulberry, owned by the Chesnut family, that occupied five square miles in Camden, South Carolina, in the middle of the state. Its household grounds were neatly planted with boxwood, jessamine, crab apple, Cherokee roses, violets, opopanax (sweet myrrh), and gardenias, pierced by an allée of live oaks. Hundreds of enslaved Blacks managed the gardens and cotton fields and the big plantation house, a three-and-a-half-story brick box with thirteen bedrooms and seven bathrooms, which alone was tended by twenty-five servants, among them Romeo, the cook; Big Judy, the pastry chef; and Quash and Scipio, stable masters—Scipio standing six-two, “a black Hercules,” as Mary described him, “and as gentle as a dove.”

Mulberry was a self-sustaining enclave with a lumber mill, grist mill, stables, forges, cotton gin, ice house, slave quarters, and other structures; a big two-story building held the kitchen and accommodations for the house slaves. The plantation was big enough to have its own Black church, where Mary now and then attended services. The grounds were enchanting, bucolic; all her needs were tended to within an instant; and the library in the big house was well stocked with books to fill her day. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of course, and chivalric delights by Byron, Scott, Tennyson, Milton, Swift, Coleridge, Burns. But she also read beyond the bounds of planter fantasy: Rabelais, Voltaire, Schiller, Goethe, in French and German.

Mary had a clear-eyed view of slavery. She had lived among enslaved men and women all her life and understood that it was the foundation of Southern society. She opposed abolition and called Lincoln a “horrid black republican ogre.” But she loathed the institution’s most unsavory aspect, the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls. “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity!” she wrote. “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over.” Mary’s biographer, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, notes that nowhere in Mary’s diary is there any evidence to suggest that her own husband, James, was guilty of such offenses.

As lovely and engaging as Mulberry was, the plantation was remote, as were most plantations throughout the South. “There hangs here as in every Southern landscape the saddest pall,” Mary wrote. Days could be tedious, unlike when her husband was a senator and they stayed for long periods in Washington City (the U.S. capital’s formal name until it became the District of Columbia in 1871). There, she lived among other Southerners, the “Southern mess,” at Brown’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and thrived on the city’s social carousel. Mulberry offered no such stimulation. “I take this somnolent life coolly,” she wrote. “I could sleep upon bare boards if I could once more be amidst the stir and excitement of a live world. These people have grown accustomed to dullness. They were born and bred in it.”

What’s more, at Mulberry she lived in claustrophobically close emotional quarters with family and the inhabitants of neighboring plantations. “Peace, comfort, happiness, I have found away from home,” she wrote. “Only your own family, those nearest and dearest, can hurt you. Wrangling, rows, heart burnings, bitterness, envy, hatred and malice, unbrotherly love, family snarls, neighborhood strife, and ill blood—a lovely brood I have conjured up. But they were all there, and for these many years I have almost forgotten them. I find them always alive and rampant when I go back to semi-village life. For after all, though we live miles apart—everybody flying round on horses or in carriages—it amounts to a village community. Everybody knows exactly where to put the knife.”

In Washington, by contrast, her life was “delightful.” She became celebrated for her wit and her deep knowledge of literature, and her willingness to confront men and women alike with difficult topics of conversation. John Manning, the very handsome former governor of South Carolina, described a conversation with Mary in a letter to his wife: “Mrs C very talkative introducing great names in her discourse as if intimate with them and giving her husband sharp hits in a quite unprovoked way.”

With her husband out of office, Mary returned to Mulberry with reluctance. “Going back to Mulberry to live,” she sighed in her diary, “was indeed offering up my life on the altar of country.”

The train journey from Florida was long and grueling. At length she reached Camden and found that the news of Lincoln’s election had managed to disrupt its usual slumber. “Camden was in unprecedented excitement,” she wrote. “Minute men arming with immense blue cockades and red sashes, soon with sword and gun, marching and drilling.”

HALF AN HOUR AFTER receiving the news that Senator Chesnut had resigned, James Hammond, South Carolina’s only remaining U.S. senator, sent off his own resignation letter. Hammond confessed in his diary that he wasn’t quite sure why Chesnut had quit and, for that matter, wasn’t even sure why he himself had done likewise, though he conceded that he had felt out of place in the Senate ever since his election and had long hoped for “a good pretext” to escape it. Even success—his mudsill speech of 1858—had made him ill. “C’est fini,” he wrote to his son Marcus. Secessionist passions now ruled the state, he told him. “People are wild. The scenes of the French Revolution are being enacted already.”

For a time, Hammond had become wary of secession, especially if the movement were led by South Carolina, a state known for erratic judgment. An independent South had been “the cherished dream and hope of my life,” he wrote, but it had to be done right. Better, he felt, for a state without South Carolina’s radical reputation to lead the way. The prospect of a war did not worry him; he doubted secession would lead to violence. But he did harbor the concern that once having exited the Union, the Southern states might descend into a political free-for-all dominated by radicals—“the little great men”—seeking only power and personal gratification. But with Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession looking more and more like certainties, and having satisfied himself that “it was a movement of the People of the South,” not just fire-eaters and silver-tongued demagogues, Hammond set aside his reservations and fell into line. He held a secret meeting at his home attended by an array of South Carolina leaders, including then governor William H. Gist and James Orr, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to discuss the best way to orchestrate the state’s departure.

“Whatever happens the die is cast with us,” he wrote to an acquaintance on November 22. Carolina would undoubtedly secede and was perfectly willing to go out alone, he wrote, but added he felt strongly that the state should make its exit in company with others. “What she desires,” he wrote, exercising his penchant for deploying feminine pronouns to refer to the state, “is a Southern Slaveholding Confederacy and to exemplify to the world the perfection of our civilization, the immensity of our resources and that the wonderful progress of these United States is mainly due to us.”

He vowed to a friend, “I will support it with all the strength I have.”