Mary Chesnut’s War Fever: Disease in the Civil War Narrative of a Lost Cause Dissenter

• Published in: The journal of the Civil War era 2022-06, Vol.12 (2), p.203-233
• Main Author: Adkins, Christina K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American Civil War; Barnwell, Robert Woodward; Biographies; Book publishing; Chesnut, James; Chesnut, Mary Boykin; Chesnut, Mary Boykin Miller (1823-1886); Diaries; Disease; Dissenters; Editorials; Fatalities; Fever; Illnesses; Physiology; Revisions; Slavery; Typhoid
• ISSN: 2154-4727; 2159-9807; 2159-9807
• DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2022.0037

In the 1880s, Mary Boykin Chesnut transformed her wartime journals into one of the most important first-person accounts and literary works of the Civil War era. With an examination of how changing medical theories influenced Chesnut's writing, this article analyzes the representation of disease in Chesnut's 1880s narrative and its evolution from her original 1860s diaries. It argues that as Chesnut crafted her narrative-in-diurnal-form, she amplified the significance of disease--both literal and figurative. She made disease prominent in her depiction of slavery and central to her account of Confederate defeat in ways that diverged from the Lost Cause mythology but were obscured by early twentieth-century editors. The article concludes with a discussion of how the decisions of her early editors affected Chesnut's portrayal of disease in two problematic editions of her narrative, published in 1905 and 1949.