1 June 1865, South Carolina

"Went to the Hermitage yesterday (our plantation). Saw no change–not a soul absent from his or her post. I said, 'Good colored folks, when are you going to kick off the traces and be free?'
In their furious emotional way they swore devotion to us to their dying day.
All the same, the minute they see an opening to better themselves they will move on.
William, my husband's foster brother, came up.
'Well, William, what do you want?'
'Only to look at you, Marster—it does me good.' No doubt it paid. Both parties, white and black, talked beautifully."

23 April 1865, Chester, South Carolina

"And these negroes—unchanged. The shining black mask they wear does not show a ripple of change—sphinxes. [House slave] Ellen has had my diamonds to keep for a week or so. When the danger was over she handed them back to me, with as little apparent interest in the matter as if they were garden peas."

March 1865, Lincolnton, North Carolina

"Yarn is our circulating medium. It is the current coin of the realm. At a factory here, Mrs Glover traded off a negro woman for yarn. The woman wanted to go there as a factory hand, so it suited all round. I held up my hands! Mrs Munro said:
'Mrs Glover knows she will be free in a few days. Besides, that's nothing. Yesterday a negro man was sold for a keg of nails.'
'God's will be done,' escaped from Mr Martin's lips, in utter amazement.
'This shows slavery is in its death throes.'
'General C said we were lighthearted at the ruin of the great slave-owners. An unholy joy.'
They will have no negroes now to lord it over. They can swell and peacock about and tyrannize now over only a small parcel of women and children—those only who are their very own family."

25 February 1865, regarding slavery

"Mrs Johnston said she would never own slaves.

'I might say the same thing. I never would. Mr Chesnut does, but he hates slavery, especially African slavery.'

'What do you mean by African?'

'To distinguish that form from the inevitable slavery of the world. All married women, all children, and girls who live in their father's houses are slaves.'"

16 February 1865, Lincolnton, North Carolina, "those last days"

"My ideas of those last days are confused.
The Martins left Columbia the Friday before I did. And their mammy, the negro woman who had nursed them, refused to go with them. That daunted me. Then Mrs McCord, who was to send her girls with me, changed her mind. She sent them upstairs in her house—and actually took away the staircase—that was her plan.
Then I met Mr Christopher Hampton arranging to take off his sisters. They were flitting—but only as far as Yorkville. He said it was time to move on. Sherman at Orangeburg was barely a day's journey from Columbia, and that he left a track as bare and blackened as a fire in the prairies.
So my time had come, too. My husband urged me to go home. He said Camden would be safe enough. They had no spite to that old town—as they have to Charleston and Columbia. Molly, weeping and wailing, came in while we were at table, wiping her red-hot face with her cook's grimy apron. She said I ought to go among our own black people on the plantation. They would take care of me better than anyone else. So I agreed to go to Mulberry or the Hermitage plantation and sent Laurence with a wagon load of my valuables.
Then a Miss Patterson called—a refugee from Tennessee. She had been in a country overrun by Yankee invaders—and she described so graphically all the horrors to be endured by those subjected to fire and sword and rapine and plunder that I was fairly scared and determined to come here. This is a thoroughly out-of-all-routes place. And yet I can go to Charlotte. I am halfway to Kate at Flat Rock. And there is no Federal army between me and Richmond."

19 March 1864, Richmond, "the toy boy"

"C. C. also told us of a new toy—Fitz Lee's new-found joy—a little negro boy. This toy, when wound up, danced Ethiopian minstrel fashion. Fitz Lee sings corn-shucking tunes and the toy boy dances. C. C. has already made the little black boy two suits of clothes. He is the delight of Richmond salons and is so much handled his dress soon grows shabby."

The scent of freedom

"I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself—perched on his knife board. He won't look at me now. He looks over my head—he scents freedom in the air. He was always very ambitious. I do not think he ever troubled books much. But then as my father said, Dick, standing in front of his sideboard, had heard of all subjects of heaven or earth discussed—and by the best heads in our world.
He is proud, too, in his way. Hetty his wife complained the other menservants were so fine in their livery.
'Nonsense, old woman—a butler never demeans himself to wear livery. He is always in plain clothes.' Somewhere he picked up on that.
He is the first negro that I have felt a change in. They go about in their black masks, not a ripple or an emotion showing—and yet on all other subjects except the war they are the most excitable all races. Now, Dick might make a very respectable Egyptian sphinx, so inscrutably silent is he."

Regarding slavery and race

"Reading Mrs Stowe or Redpath's John Brown,* one feels utterly confounded at the atrocity of African slavery. We look upon the miserable black race as crushed to earth, habitually knocked down, as John Brown says, 'by an iron shovel or anything that comes handy.' At home we see them, the idlest, laziest, fattest, most comfortably contented peasantry that ever cumbered the earth—and we forget there is anything wrong in slavery at all.
I daresay the truth lies between the two extremes."

*The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860) by antislavery journalist James Redpath.

9 July 1862, Columbia, South Carolina

"Table talk today:
This war was undertaken by us to shake off the yoke of foreign invaders. So we consider our cause righteous. The Yankees, since the war has begun, have discovered it is to free the slaves they are fighting—so their cause is noble. They also expect to make the war pay. Yankees do not undertake anything that does not pay. They think we belong to them. We have been good milk cows. Milked by the tariff, or skimmed. We let them have all of our hard earnings. We bore the ban of slavery. They got the money. Cotton pays everybody who handles it, sells it, manufactures it, &c&c—rarely pays the men who make it. Secondhand, they received the wages of slavery. They grew rich, we grew poor. Receiver is as bad as the thief. That applies to us, too—we received these savages they stole from Africa and brought to us in their slave ships. Like the Egyptians, if they let us go, it must be across a red sea of blood."

June 1862, Gen. Winfield Scott (ret.) weighs in

"General Scott on Southern soldiers. He says we have élan, courage, woodcraft, consummate horsemanship, endurance of pain equal to the Indians, but that we will not submit to discipline. We will not take care of things or husband our resources. Where we are, there is waste and destruction. If it could all be done by one wild desperate dash, we would do it. But he does not think we can stand the long blank months between the acts—waiting! We can bear pain without a murmur, but we will not submit to be bored, &c&c&c.
Now for the other side. They can wait. They can bear discipline. They can endure forever—losses in battle nothing to them, resources in men and materials of war inexhaustible. And if they see fit they will fight to the bitter end.
Nice prospect for us—as comforting for us as the old man's croak at Mulberry, 'Bad times, worse coming.'
Old Mr Chesnut says, 'We could not have kept slavery here a day, but the powerful government of the U.S.A. protected it for us.'"

June 1862, the concerns of Molly

"Molly all in tears because I asked her if she were going to turn against me.
No, she would follow me to the ends of the earth—that is, she would if it warn't for her children. But this is the reason she was out. Jonathan is her father, and he is driver, headman of the colored people (she never says 'negroes'—the only 'nigger' is the devil—that's her idea). Overseer and Claiborne, head of the plows, connive to cheat master 'outin everything. Marster—the best marster the lord ever send.' So much lying, cheating, on a plantation—no wonder she came back outer sorts. 'Overseer's wife gotten so fat on yo' substance she can't git through the little gate—have to open the wagon gate for her. Sometimes of Sundays two hams is put on their table—de 'oman sho' to die of fat.'
So Molly and I are reconciled, and she is as good and as attentive as ever. All the same, she was awfully stuck up when she first came back."

10 June 1862

"I see one new light breaking in upon the black question.
Even my [house slave] Molly speaks scornfully when she alludes to 'them white people.' She says there is salt enough on the plantation. Master had the [salt] sent to the coast, three days journey—'but we don't git enough. There is plenty of bread—and all the people has fine fat hogs, but you see our people n'usen to salt as much as they choose—and now they will grumble.'
When I told J.C. that Molly was full of airs since her late trip home, he made answer. 'Tell her to go to the devil—she or anybody else on the plantation who is dissatisfied. Let them go. It is bother enough to feed and clothe them now.'
It was a blow. When he went over to the plantation, he came back charmed with their loyalty to them—their affection for him&c&c&c."

14 March 1862, the subject of double standards

"There are no negro marital relations, or the want of them, half so shocking as Mormonism. And yet the U.S.A. makes no bones of receiving Mormons into her sacred heart.
Mr Venable said England held her hand over 'the malignant and the turbaned Turk' to save and protect him, slaves, seraglio, and all. But she rolls up the whites of her eyes at us. When slavery, bad as it is, is stepping out into freedom every moment through Christian civilization.
They do not grudge the Turk even his bag and Bosporus privileges. To a recalcitrant wife it is: 'Here yawns the sick. There yawns the sea'—&c.
And France, the bold, the brave, the ever free—she is not so tenderfoot in Algiers.
But then, 'you are another' argument is a shabby one.
'You see,' says Mary [Preston] sagaciously. 'We are white Christian descendants of Huguenots and Cavaliers, and they expect of us different conduct from mere Turks and Algerian pirates.'"

13 March 1862, upon re-reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

"These negro women have a chance here women have nowhere else. They can redeem themselves. The 'impropers.' They can marry decently—and nothing is remembered against them, these colored ladies. It is not a nice topic, but Mrs [Harriet Beecher] Stowe revels in it. How delightfully pharisaic a feeling it must be, to rise superior and fancy we are so degraded as to defend and like to live with such degraded creatures around us. Such men as Legare [Legree] and his women.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
published 1851 in newspaper installments,
then in 1852 as a two-volume book

The best way to take negroes to your heart is to get as far away from them as possible. As far as I can see, Southern women do all that missionaries could to prevent and alleviate the evils. The social evil has not been suppressed in England or New England, London or Boston. And they expect more virtue from a plantation African than they can practice with all their high moral surroundings—light, education, training, and supports....
There are true, graceful, beautiful mothers of angelic Evas—North as well as South, I daresay. The Northern men and women who came here have always been hardest, for they expect an African to work and behave as a white man. We do not....
Topsys I have known—but none that were beauties—or ill-used. Evas are mostly in the heaven of Mrs Stowe's imagination. People can't love things dirty, ugly, repulsive, simply because they ought, but they can be good to them—at a distance. You see, I cannot rise very high. I can only judge what I see."

27 November 1861, the Northern misperception

"When Mrs Chesnut* married South, her husband was as wealthy as her brothers-in-law, Mr Binney or Mr Stevens. How is it now? Their money has accumulated for their children. Their old man's goes to support a horde of idle dirty Africans—while he is abused and vilified as a cruel slave-owner. I wish his 'Uncle Tom'—for he has one who never tasted calamity in any shape and whose gray hairs are honored, though they frame a black face—could be seen or could be heard as he tells me of 'me & master'—&c&c&c. We are human beings of the nineteenth century—and slavery has to go, of course. All that has been gained by it goes to the North and to negroes. The slave-owners, when they are good men and women, are the martyrs. And as far as I have seen, the people here are quite as good as anywhere else. I hate slavery. I even hate the harsh authority I see parents think it their duty to exercise toward their children.
There now!! What good does it do to write all that? I have before me a letter I wrote to Mr C while he was on our plantation in Mississippi in 1842. It is the most fervid abolition document I have ever read. I came across it, burning letters the other day. That letter I did not burn. I kept it—as showing how we were not as much of heathens as our enlightened enemies think. Their philanthropy is cheap. There are as noble, pure lives here as there—and a great deal more of self-sacrifice. . . ."

*Mary Boykin Chesnut's mother-in-law Mary Bowes Cox Chestnut (1775-1864) was from a prominent Philadelphia family. Also indicated are Philadelphia attorney/legislator Horace Binney and New Jersey entrepreneur Edwin Stevens.

November 1861, the complexities of color

"Martha Adamson is a beautiful mulatress. That is, as good-looking as they ever are to me. I have never seen a mule as handsome as a horse—and I know I never will—no matter how I lament and sympathize with its undeserved mule condition. She is a trained sempstress and 'hired her own time,' as they call it. That is, the owner pays the doctor bill, finds food and clothing, &c. The slave pays his master five dollars a month, more or less, and makes a dollar a day if he pleases.
Martha, to the amazement of everybody, married a coal black negro, son of Dick the barber—that Dick who was set free fifty years ago or more for faithful services rendered Mr Chesnut's grandfather.
When asked in words such as these: 'How could she? She is so nearly white—how could she marry that horrid negro? It is positively shocking!'—answer: 'She inherits the taste of her white father—her mother was black.'
'How coarse you are.'
The son of this marriage, a bright boy called John, is grown—reads and writes—&c&c. The aforesaid Martha is now a widow. Her husband was free though black.
Last night there was a row. John beat a white man who was at his mother's. Poor Martha drinks. John had forbidden Mr T___ to bring whiskey to the house, and he found him seated at the table with his mother, both drunk. So he beat him all the way home to his own house. Verdict of the community: 'Served him right.' [House slave] Maria's word: 'White people say, "Well done! Go it, John—give it to him!"'"

12 November 1861

"Went to the turnout at Mulberry for Mr C. Met only Minnie Frierson.* She says they are hanging negroes in Louisiana and Mississippi, like birds in the trees, for an attempted insurrection. But out there they say the same thing of South Carolina, and we know it is as quiet as the grave here and as peaceful, except that one spot—Beaufort. We have no reason to suppose a negro knows there is a war. I do not speak of the war to them. On that subject they do not believe a word you say.
'How do I know that?'
'Watch the sudden deadening of their faces. The utter want of any possible expression as soon as one of these men has in his mouth a word that comes now so often—"Damn Yankee."'"

*Mary Chesnut "Minnie" Frierson was the wife of Sumter District planter James J. Frierson and niece of Mary Boykin Chesnut's husband.

21 September 1861

"Poor Cousin Betsey Witherspoon* was murdered! She did not die peacefully, as we supposed, in her bed. Murdered by her own people. Her negroes.
I remember when Dr Keitt was murdered by his negroes. Mr Miles met me and told the dreadful story.
'Very awkward, this sort of thing. There goes Keitt, in the house always declaiming about the "beneficent institution." How now?'
Horrible beyond words.
Her household negroes were so insolent, so pampered and insubordinate, that she lived alone and at home. She knew, she said, that none of her children would have the patience she had with these people who had been indulged and spoiled by her until they were like spoiled children. Simply intolerable.
Mr Chesnut and David Williams have gone over at once." ...

24 September 1861

"Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why should they want to hurt me? Two-thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to negroes because they are so in my power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing. Somehow today I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?"

*Elizabeth Boykin "Betsey" Witherspoon was the widow of John Dick Witherspoon, a wealthy planter, lawyer, and state legislator of Darlington District, South Carolina. She was a first cousin of Mary Boykin Chesnut's mother, as well as mother-in-law of a niece of M.B.C.'s husband James Chesnut, Jr.

19 September 1861, 'Mulberry,' South Carolina

"The high and disinterested conduct our enemies seem to expect of us is involuntary and unconscious praise.
They pay us the compliment to look for from us—a degree of virtue they were never able to practice themselves. A word of our crowning misdemeanor, holding in slavery still those Africans they brought here from Africa or sold to us when they found they did not pay. They gradually slided (or slid?) them off down here. Freed them prospectively, giving themselves years to get rid of them in a remunerative way. We want to spread them, too—west and south—or northwest, where the climate would free them or kill them, improve them out of the world as they do Indians. If they had been forced to keep them in New England, I daresay they would have shared the Indians' fate. For they are wise in their generation, these Yankee children of light. Those pernicious Africans!
Result of the conversation between Mr C and Uncle John—both ci-devant Union men. Now utterly for states rights."

August 1861, in transit

"Coming home, the following conversation....
'Suppose the women and children secede?'
'Knit your stocking. We have had enough for today.'
Aside: 'She was trying to imitate Thackeray.'
'But you know, our women all speak in that low, plaintive way because they are always excusing themselves for something they never did.'
'And the Yankee women are loud and shrill because they fight it out—fair field and no favor—and when incompatibility comes in, they go out for divorce. And they talk as if money only bought black women in slave countries. Women are bought and sold everywhere.'"