![]() ![]() ![]() Visiting did not end for Chesnut and the other gentile Southern ladies of her community, but now their conversations turned to war. In every location, she opened her home to others as a social gathering place. Chesnut lived in or visited various locations throughout the South, most notably Montgomery, Alabama, Columbia, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, where she came into regular contact with the Jefferson Davises and the Robert E. Thirty years ago, I first encountered Chesnut’s writing and fell in love (total love!) with her firsthand, play-by-play accounts of the Civil War. At the same time, she wants to record more than just the facts of history, by telling her story over and over again artfully. She wants to document history so that her readers won’t forget. This passage is but one of many in the book that signals Chesnut’s desire to tell the story of the South during the Civil War. She told it simply, but over and over again, with slight variations as to words – never as to facts. In her book on the American Civil War, Mary Boykin Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate general, describes a woman seeking a pardon for her husband: “She was strong, and her way of telling her story was hard and cold enough. ![]()
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