MONTGOMERY

Of Spiders and Entrails

MARCH 11

IN MONTGOMERY, MARY CHESNUT KEPT UP HER SOCIAL SPELUNKING. Delegates and their wives often gathered at her boarding house. “In full conclave tonight,” she wrote, on Monday, March 11, “—the drawing room was full of judges, governors, senators, generals, congressmen.” Story after story flew past, flurries of gossip: the deep piety of John C. Calhoun; one attorney’s confessed admiration for a beautiful woman back in Washington who was not his wife. Then came a random story told by Judge Withers, Mary’s daunting uncle, of a married couple “who quarreled on a bridge and the man said, blubbering, ‘Nancy, take the baby; I will drown myself.’ But she said, ‘No, take the baby with you. I want none of your breed left!’ What a tale.”

The tale telling that night went on a little too long for Mary’s husband, James, who had retreated upstairs. “Mr. Chesnut making such a stamping over head,” she wrote. “I knew his patience at my long stay was exhausted.” She ignored it. She and several other women then turned to the subject of the laws governing divorce. “These women had studied it thoroughly,” Mary wrote. “One especially seemed to have so exact a knowledge of its various provisions in every state, her husband seemed to dislike the suspicion such knowledge cast upon her.”

The marital excavations continued. One woman, Mrs. Lafayette Borland, suddenly went quiet as Mary “expatiated on the folly of a woman’s leaving her husband.”

As Mary now learned, Mrs. Borland had left her husband several years before.

“Here after,” Mary wrote in her diary, “I deal in generalities!”

They eventually circled to her own husband, James, who claimed to have felt hurt by a chance remark from a Georgia man who had accused him of keeping things to himself.

“Mr. C, thinking himself an open, frank, confiding person, asked me if he was not,” Mary wrote. “Truth required me to say that I knew no more what Mr. C thought or felt on any subject now than I did twenty years ago. Sometimes I feel that we understand each other a little—then up goes the Iron Wall once more.”

She took a moment that day to reflect on her own diary keeping. “I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me,” she wrote, “for I spend the time now like a spider spinning my own entrails instead of reading as my habit was at all spare moments.” She was paraphrasing a passage from a seventeenth-century play, Marriage à la Mode, by John Dryden, who wrote, “Our souls sit close and silently within,/And their own webs from their own entrails spin.”