The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck "always to stumble in on the real show." Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South's headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime's death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion, she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her. In her own circles, the aristocratic, patriarchal, slave-holding Mary Chesnut was a figure of heresy and of paradox: she had a horror of slavery and called herself an abolitionist from early youth. Edited by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut's Civil War presents a full and reliable edition of Chesnut's journals, restoring her to her rightful place in American history and literature. "A Southern War and Peace." "One of the best firsthand records of the Confederate experience…Electrifying." "A great epic drama of our greatest national tragedy." "The best of all Civil War memoirs and one of the most remarkable eye-witness accounts to emerge from that or any other war." "C. Vann Woodward's impressive edition guarantees that Mary Chesnut's Civil War will take its rightful place as an American classic." "Captures vividly the experience of war in the Old South, from the first hopeful days…to the ruinous end…The book teems with interesting portraits (of generals and society ladies, of maids and slaves), with reports of battles and balls, and with highly evocative descriptions of everyday scenes that bring the period to life." "Thanks to the judicious editing of C. Vann Woodward, the great Yale historian of the South, we can read nearly the whole of Mary Chesnut's work and see precisely which passages came from the original journal of Civil War vintage and which were revised in later years. And this more authentic version is if anything more impressive as the account of an exceptional woman and the society she both represented and questioned."
