Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Photo Albums
Heritage Auctions (ha.com)
A Remarkable Collection Pays Off
The Artifact
Photograph albums kept by Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut
Condition
The Moroccan leather albums have separated at the bindings. The photographs are in excellent condition with the handwriting strong and distinct.
Details
Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Mary Boykin Chesnut and her husband, U.S. Senator James Chesnut Jr., left Washington, D.C., for their native state, South Carolina. The socially and politically connected couple, many of whose friends became leading figures in the Confederacy, settled in the state’s capital, Columbia. Over the course of the war they made eventful trips to Montgomery, Charleston, and Richmond—James as a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, then as an aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, Mary as a masterful hostess to members of the Confederate elite. Through July 1865, Mary documented her experiences in a detailed diary—published in several versions in the decades after the conflict—that provides one of the fullest pictures of the South during the Civil War.
Mary also kept photo albums—given to her by former South Carolina governor John Hugh Means on April 2, 1861—that she added to throughout the war. (Means “presented me with a book, a photo-book, in which I am to pillory all the celebrities,” she noted in her diary.) By war’s end, the albums included over 200 “cartes de visite,” photographic portraits mounted on pieces of card, many of them autographed, of prominent politicians, civilians, and generals, including Davis and his wife, Varina; Robert E. Lee and members of his family; Confederate generals John Bell Hood and Simon Bolivar Buckner; former President James Buchanan and former Senator Henry Clay; journalist Horace Greeley; and members of the Chesnut family, including Mary. After Mary’s death at 63, in November 1886, the albums passed to her niece, then to one or more photo collectors.
Quotable
Mary cited her photo collection several times in her wartime diary. On September 7, 1863, she noted that “Mrs. [Robert E.] Lee gave me a likeness of the General in a photograph taken soon after the Mexican War. She likes it so much better than the later ones. He certainly was a handsome man then, handsomer even than now. I shall prize it for Mrs. Lee’s sake, too.” On July 12, 1862, she described giving a visiting boy an album to look at. He took exception to an image in its pages. “‘You have Lincoln in your book!’ said he. ‘I am astonished at you. I hate him!’ And he placed the book on the floor and struck Old Abe in the face with his fist,” Mary wrote.
Value
$77,675 (price realized at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, in 2007). “Mary Chesnut’s Civil War photograph albums are historical treasures,” noted an auction house representative at the time. “Mary’s handwriting on the photographs is left untouched; it’s a remarkable catalog of faces collected by the famous diarist.”
Related topics: women
