Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography

TWO: 1823–1836

1823-1836 STATESBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA, in 1823, the year Mary Boykin Miller was born, was a small community already proud of its role in the history of a nation little more than forty years old. The town was situated in the middle of the state, and its earliest settlers were in the area well before the Revolution. They had first established trading posts with the Indians and then had begun to carve out large and profitableplantationsin the backcountry wilderness. The settlement was remote from Charleston, the state's cultural, intellectual, and economic center. Caught up in the events of the Revolution, the citizens of Statesburg faced the hardships and irritations of British military rule with courage born of isolation and independence. With practicaldispatch honed from their familiarity with the area, they resisted the British both covertly and openly. The rolls of the partisan bands of Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter included many names from Statesburg, and by the early 18205, the heroic adventures of these men and their families had grown into a rich fabric of legend, passed from the participants themselves to their children and grandchildren. Thus the established families of Statesburg, their friends, relatives, and business associates in Camden, several miles to the north, all possessed a feeling of intimacy with history and a sense of prosperity and respectability fairly earned and hard won. Mary Boykin Miller was born into this community on March 31, 1823, at Mount Pleasant, the plantation home of her mother's parents.1 Her mother, Mary Boykin Miller, had been nineteen for less than a month when this her eldest child was born; her father, Stephen Decatur Miller, thirty-four, had already buried a much loved first wife and two sons. A lawyer by training, he had served TWO 1823-1836 {13} a term in the United States Congress and was, in 1823, a senator in the South Carolina legislature. Both parents were to have a strong and positive influence on their daughter. Each brought to the child a heritage that stressed the importance of family, honor, and a deep respect for the values of honesty and duty. Equally important to Mary's development, both parents enjoyed life thoroughly and took pleasure in observing human nature with an objective but good-humored eye. Stephen Decatur Miller was not by birth a member of the upcountry elite. Born on May 8, 1788, in the Waxhaw Settlement, a small community near the North Carolina line in Lancaster District , he was the son of Margaret White, of Scotch-Irish descent, and Charles Miller, English. Both of Stephen's parents were Presbyterians whose ancestors had emigrated to this country prior to the Revolution. Because his people were not prominent and because they kept few records, little is known about them. They seem to have been yeoman farmers, later described by Miller as "respectable & unambitious." However, despite meager funds, Stephen and at least two of his brothers received good educations.2 Stephen attended a neighborhood school, where he was taught classicalliterature and the scriptures. In 1808 he graduated from the newly founded South Carolina College in Columbia. From 1808 to 1811, he read law with John S. Richardson, who kept offices in Statesburg and nearby Sumter. Richardson was elected attorney general of South Carolina in 1810, and the following year Miller was admitted to the bar and took over Richardson's practice. Tall, slim, dark, with a rather harsh voice and an expressive face, Stephen Decatur Miller had achieved a reputation as a man of promise in his early twenties. In 1814 he married Elizabeth Dick of Sumter, and in 1815 his first child, Elias Dick Miller, was born.3 Two more sons, John Richardson and William Smith, followed in the next three years, but both died in infancy or very early childhood. At the age of twenty-nine, Miller was elected to Congress in 1817 and went to Washington, leaving his wife and children at home; but inJanuary, 1818, he learned that his wife was very ill, and immediately returned to South Carolina. When she recovered enough to travel, {14} MARY BOYKIN CHESNUT Miller took her back to Washington. Elizabeth Dick Miller died the following year, and at the end of his congressional term Miller returned to Statesburg and resumed his law practice.4 On May 9, 1821, he married seventeen-year-old Mary Boykin. Although she was hardly more than a child herself, the...