“Sally Hampton went to Richmond with the Rev. Mr. Martin. She arrived there on Wednesday. On Thursday her father, Wade Hampton, fought a great battle, but just did not win it-a victory narrowly missed. Darkness supervened and impenetrable woods prevented that longed-for consummation. Preston Hampton rode recklessly into the hottest fire. His father sent his brother, Wade, to bring him back. Wade saw him reel in the saddle and galloped up to him, General Hampton following. As young Wade reached him, Preston fell from his horse, and the one brother, stooping to raise the other, was himself shot down. Preston recognized his father, but died without speaking a word. Young Wade, though wounded, held his brother's head up. Tom Taylor and others hurried up. The General took his dead son in his arms, kissed him, and handed his body to Tom Taylor and his friends, bade them take care of Wade, and then rode back to his post. At the head of his troops in the thickest of the fray he directed the fight for the rest of the day. Until night he did not know young Wade's fate; that boy might be dead, too! Now, he says, no son of his must be in his command. When Wade recovers, he must join some other division. The agony of such a day, and the anxiety and the duties of the battle-field-it is all more than a mere man can bear.”—Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, entry for November 6, 1864, A Diary From Dixie, As Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Wife of James Chesnut, Jr., edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avery (1905)
Unlike WWI, the Civil War produced few great works of fiction by combatants or eyewitnesses. (The Red Badge of Courage was written by a man, Stephen Crane, who wasn’t even born when the war was over. Offhand, the only fictional works that fit the bill, I think, were the haunting short stories of Ambrose Bierce.)
But nonfiction was a different story—a tidal wave of memoirs, letters, and diaries that redefined how the world viewed warfare. South Carolina aristocrat Mary Chesnut’s diary has earned special acclaim.
As the wife of a prominent politician and general—not to mention the good friend of Jefferson Davis’s wife--Chesnut knew everyone who counted in the Confederacy. However, she was no simple apologist for the Southern way of life. Her entries are filled with a barely submerged resentment of the Southern patriarchal system, and she wished for an end to slavery for reasons both selfish (slaveowners’ wives, she felt, were saddled with too much responsibility for the welfare of slaves) and moral (she loathed the hypocrisy of owners who praised southern womanhood, only to father children by their female slaves).
I had wanted to read (but couldn't get my hands on) Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Woodward’s work is supposed to teem with information on the full background of the personalities involved with each entry in Chesnut’s diary. Still, this particular entry, from an earlier edition of her work, is almost self-contained, even self-explanatory.
Chesnut wrote her original diary entries on virtually any piece of paper at hand. As the conflict neared its end, she decided a more permanent record was needed, so she transcribed her earlier recollections in more durable volumes.
I liked this entry because of its precise detail, as well as for the almost novelistic unfolding of tragedy that befell Wade Hampton. The general would enjoy a revived political career after the Reconstruction era, but I don’t think he ever had such a bad day in his whole life as he did here.
Unlike WWI, the Civil War produced few great works of fiction by combatants or eyewitnesses. (The Red Badge of Courage was written by a man, Stephen Crane, who wasn’t even born when the war was over. Offhand, the only fictional works that fit the bill, I think, were the haunting short stories of Ambrose Bierce.)
But nonfiction was a different story—a tidal wave of memoirs, letters, and diaries that redefined how the world viewed warfare. South Carolina aristocrat Mary Chesnut’s diary has earned special acclaim.
As the wife of a prominent politician and general—not to mention the good friend of Jefferson Davis’s wife--Chesnut knew everyone who counted in the Confederacy. However, she was no simple apologist for the Southern way of life. Her entries are filled with a barely submerged resentment of the Southern patriarchal system, and she wished for an end to slavery for reasons both selfish (slaveowners’ wives, she felt, were saddled with too much responsibility for the welfare of slaves) and moral (she loathed the hypocrisy of owners who praised southern womanhood, only to father children by their female slaves).
I had wanted to read (but couldn't get my hands on) Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Woodward’s work is supposed to teem with information on the full background of the personalities involved with each entry in Chesnut’s diary. Still, this particular entry, from an earlier edition of her work, is almost self-contained, even self-explanatory.
Chesnut wrote her original diary entries on virtually any piece of paper at hand. As the conflict neared its end, she decided a more permanent record was needed, so she transcribed her earlier recollections in more durable volumes.
I liked this entry because of its precise detail, as well as for the almost novelistic unfolding of tragedy that befell Wade Hampton. The general would enjoy a revived political career after the Reconstruction era, but I don’t think he ever had such a bad day in his whole life as he did here.
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