Mary Chesnut's Civil War

By: Mary Chesnut, C. Vann Woodward

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History

“A feast for Civil War buffs … One of the best firsthand records of the Confederate experience … Electrifying.”—Walter Clemons, Newsweek

“A great epic drama of our greatest national tragedy.”—William Styron, New York Review of Books

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©1981 C. Vann Woodward, Sally Bland Metts, Barbara G. Carpenter, Sally Bland Johnson, and Katherine W. Herbert (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

Amazing book

Excellent book and the true insights into the Civil War by Msm Chestnut is amazing.

Fascinating look at upper class South

This is an absorbing look at how the upper class South thought, talked, acted and worried during the Civil War. Very insightful read about how they reacted to the war, the increasing downturn in their economy, the gradual sense of the war being lost, emancipation and all the other events that made up their experience during that tragic war. The narration by Suzanne Toren is absolutely incredible. If I should ever meet Ms. Chestnut in an afterlife or somewhere, I would hope she sounds exactly like Ms. Toren. She does a wonderful job on an exceptional diary/book.