On Display at The University of South Carolina

Mary Boykin Chesnut’s diary offers a first-person view of the Civil War from the upper reaches of Southern society. She details what it was like to sit atop a house in Charleston, S.C., and watch the shelling of Fort Sumter, and, later, what it was like in Chester, S.C., to receive news of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with “the Elite of the Confederacy — going and coming — and when night comes … more beds are made on the floor of the landing place. …The whole house is a bivouac.’ Read More

The original diary is housed in Columbia, this is perhaps the best resource for a first person experience of the War from start to finish.  Anyone that has never read the words of Mary Boykin Chesnut has missed an experience.