1861-65, Unexpurgated

A DIARY FROM DIXIE (572 pp.)--Mary Boykin Chesnut--Edited by Ben Ames Williams--Houghton Mifflin ($5).

Mrs. James Chesnut was 38 when the Civil War began. Highbred and lively, daughter of a governor of South Carolina and wife of a Confederate Senator, she was the sort of Charleston hostess to whom Jefferson Davis, Stephen Mallory, Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs and other pillars of the Confederacy told state secrets.

When Lincoln was inaugurated, Mrs. Chesnut began to keep a journal. After the war she transcribed her jottings, found that they filled 50 notebooks. At her death in 1886 she left them to a girlhood friend, who had them published in a highly expurgated edition. The re-editing job that Novelist Ben Ames Williams has done on Mary Chesnut may not only change the old picture of a slightly stuffy diarist, it may also alter a few notions of what life in the Confederacy was like.

The Old Sinner. "I traveled with a racking headache and a morphine bottle," Mary Chesnut wrote of her trip from Charleston to the secession conference in Montgomery, Ala. "I felt a nervous dread and horror of this break with so great a power as the United States, but I was ready and willing." In Montgomery she went to supper with Governor Moore ("The old sinner has been making himself ridiculous with that little actress Maggie Mitchell"). She saw a Negro woman sold into slavery: "My very soul sickened." She said to a Northern-born woman: "If you can stand that, no other Southern thing need choke you."

In September 1861 Mrs. Chesnut left the charm of "dear delightful Charleston," never so courtly as during the bombardment of Fort Sumter, visited in Richmond with the Jefferson Davises, got to White Sulphur Springs in time to hear about the victory at Bull Run, then moved to Mulberry, one of her father-in-law's plantations in South Carolina.

Her husband's idea in sending her to Mulberry was to insure her safety. Mary expected to be bored to death. For one thing, her father-in-law, Colonel James Chesnut, was 91, blind and deaf. But, as it turned out, Mary felt neither entirely bored nor entirely safe. One day she wrote in her journal: "Our cousin, Mrs. Witherspoon of Society Hill, was found dead in her bed. She was quite well the night before . . ." Mrs. Witherspoon, it developed, had been murdered. Her son, riding away, had foolishly told some of the slaves that he was going to punish them the next day. That night the slaves smothered the old woman in her bed, assuming, concluded Mary, that in the excitement over the death their punishment would be forgotten.

Don't Touch That Soup! The murder went so quietly that the slaves decided to rob the old lady, too. While they were getting into her trunks, she revived. The second attempt was more thorough, left traces. It also terrified the few white people at Mulberry. When their maids offered to sleep in the same room, to protect them, the women were even more terrified. When they sat down to dinner, old Mrs. Chesnut cried: "I warn you! Don't touch that soup! It is bitter. There is something wrong about it." As it happened, the soup was all right, but the sense of security was gone.

Such incidents give a picture of life behind the Confederate lines that few Southern histories dwell upon. In the latter part of Mary Chesnut's diary her original editors found less to expurgate, but readers will discover that old familiar accounts--the frantic gaiety in Richmond, the political intrigues within the Confederate government, the bewilderment at Sherman's advance--take on new meaning in the light of the tension that people such as Mary Chesnut felt around them.

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