Mary Boykin Miller1
Female, #46362, (31 Mar 1823 - 22 Nov 1886)
| Parent | Governor Stephen Decatur Miller of South Carolina1 (1788 - 1838) | |
| Parent | Mary Whitaker Boykin1 (3 Mar 1804 - 9 Feb 1885) | |
Mary Boykin Miller|b. 31 Mar 1823\nd. 22 Nov 1886|p46362.htm|Governor Stephen Decatur Miller of South Carolina|b. 1788\nd. 1838|p46361.htm|Mary Whitaker Boykin|b. 3 Mar 1804\nd. 9 Feb 1885|p46360.htm|||||||Burwell Boykin|b. 1752\nd. 17 Aug 1817|p45791.htm|Mary Whitaker|b. 5 Dec 1772\nd. 7 Oct 1838|p46332.htm| | ||
| Birth* | 31 Mar 1823 | She was born on 31 Mar 1823 at Statesboro, Sumter District, South Carolina.1 |
| She was the daughter of Governor Stephen Decatur Miller of South Carolina and Mary Whitaker Boykin.1 | ||
| Married Name | 23 Apr 1840 | As of 23 Apr 1840, her married name was Chesnut.1 |
| Marriage* | 23 Apr 1840 | She married James Chesnut Jr. on 23 Apr 1840.1 |
| Death* | 22 Nov 1886 | She died on 22 Nov 1886.2 |
| Biography* | Mary Boykin Miller was born 31 March 1823 in Stateboro [sic], SC, eldest child of Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller, who had served as U.S. congressman and senator and in 1826 was elected governor of South Carolina as a proponent of nullification. Educated first at home and in Camden schools, Mary Miller was sent at 13 to a French boarding school in Charleston, where she remained for two years broken by a six-month stay on her father's cotton plantation in frontier Mississippi. In 1838 Miller died and Mary returned to Camden. On 23 April 1840 she married James Chesnut, Jr.(1815-85), only surviving son of one of South Carolina's largest landowners. Mary spent most of the next 20 years in Camden and at Mulberry, her husband's family plantation. When James was elected to the Senate in 1858, his wife accompanied him to Washington where friendships were begun with many politicians who would become the leading figures of the Confederacy, among them Varina and Jefferson Davis. Following Lincoln's election, James Chesnut returned to South Carolina to participate in the drafting of an ordinance of secession and subsequently served in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. He served as aide to General P.G. T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and he achieved the rank of general. During the war, Mary accompained her husband to Charleston, Montgomery, Columbia, and Richmond, her drawing room always serving as a salon for the Confederate elite. From February 1861 to July 1865 she recorded her experiences in a series of diaries, which became the principal source material for her famous portrait of the Conferacy. Following the war, the Chesnuts returned to Camden and worked unsuccessfully to extricate themselves from heavy debts. After a first abortive attempt in the 1870s to smooth the diaries into publishable form, Mary Chesnut tried her hand at fiction. She completed by never published three novels, then in the early 1880s expanded and extensively revised her diaries into the book now known as Mary Chesnut's Civil War (first published in truncated and poorly edited versions in 1905 and 1949 as A Diary from Dixie. Although unfinished at the time of her death on 22 November 1886, Mary Chesnut's Civil War is generally acknowledged today as the finest literary work of the confederacy. Spiced by the aurthor's sharp intelligence, irreverent wit, and keen sense of irony and metaphorical vision, it uses a diary format to evoke a full, accurate picture of the South in civil war. Chesnut's book, valued as a rich historical source, owes much of its fascination to its juxtaposition of the loves and griefs of individuals against vast social upheaval and much of its power to the contrast and continuities drawn between the antelbellum world and war-torn country. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Florida State University (Names referenced above: Mary Boykin Miller Mary Boykin Miller).1 |
| Charts | Edward Boykin Descendants |
| Last Edited | 23 Feb 2006 |
Citations
- Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, editor, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
- Brady Wooten Kerr, compiler, e-mail address, Kerr/Wooten Extended Families (DB: brady), Rootsweb: WorldConnect (online family tree), Feb 2006.