Mary Chestnut on Slavery

Recently there has been speculation about slavery by people without first-hand experience. It seems appropriate to post a description by a primary source, one that had experience from the owner’s point of view.

Mary Chestnut lived near the apex of Confederate society. Her lawyer husband, a colonel in the army, was Jefferson Davis’s personal inspector and fixer, tasked with keeping the Confederate president informed about goings on beyond Richmond. The Chestnuts often hosted Davis and his wife Varina for dinner. Dinner guests also included fire-eating Texas Senator Louis Wigfall, who broke with Davis over the latter’s drive to strengthen the central government at the cost of states’ rights, even as the whole Confederacy reeled under Union conquest. Mary wrote her own account of the Civil War. Never quite finished, it was published some 19 years after her death. She never reconciled herself to the southern defeat. She did write the following diatribe about the south’s ”peculiar institution”.  

 

“I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Sumner [1] said not one word of this hated institution which is not true. Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes and not when they do wrong-and then we live surrounded by prostitutes. An abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks any worse of a negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity. Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad-this only I see. Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble their white children-and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”

 

[1] Charles Sumner, Massachusetts Senator and strident abolitionist, despised by pro-slavery folks. While sitting at a desk bolted to the floor in the Senate chamber in 1856, Sumner was beaten savagely with a heavy walking cane  by pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks. Beaten until the cane broke, Sumner collapsed, suffering serious neurological damage. Pro-slavery admirers sent Brooks new canes.  

 

I note that Mary Chestnut lays blame at the feet of enslaved women, the ultimate victims of this institution. No doubt it was humiliating being married to men who routinely sexually abused their female chattels. I would think the men who did this would be the primary villains, the powerless the least. I don’t have documentation but skin pigment alone indicates that a number of my ancestors must have dropped from the clouds.