James Chesnut, Jr.  "Presidential Aide"  January 18, 1815 - February 1, 1885

James Chesnut was the youngest of 13 children in a wealthy South Carolina family that owned five square miles of plantation land. He graduated with honors from the College of New Jersey and opened a law practice in 1837. In 1840 he married Mary Boykin Miller, the daughter of a former governor and a woman destined to be the most celebrated diarist of the Civil War.

Chesnut served 12 years in the South Carolina legislature before becoming a member of the U.S. Senate. A slave-owning secessionist who favored reopening the African slave trade, Chesnut resigned his Senate seat after the 1860 presidential election and returned home to serve on the committee that drafted South Carolina's secession ordinance. He was member of the provisional Confederate Congress and served as an aide to Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard at the fall of Fort Sumter and again at the 1st Battle of Bull Run. At Fort Sumter, Chesnut was one of the party that went to the fort and demanded its surrender before the bombardment began. After Bull Run he served on the staff of President Jefferson Davis and then was elected chief of South Carolina's militia, a post he held until autumn 1862, when Davis, a personal friend and confidant, asked him to return to Richmond and rejoin his staff. There Chesnut performed many important duties for the president and supported him though the young nation's trials.

In April 1864, Chesnut's request for field duty was granted and he was appointed brigadier general commanding a brigade of reserves in the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, a post he held until the end of the war. After the war Chesnut worked to end carpetbagger rule and as member of the Democratic party, took an active part in the reconstruction of South Carolina. Chesnut dies on his plantation near Camden on February 1, 1885.

Fascinating Fact:  Mary Boykin Chesnut gave a surprising description of living on a plantation. She likened it to being a missionary in Africa in there were only a few white people surrounded by hundreds of blacks- and it seemed to her that the whites spent all their time ministering to the needs of the blacks.


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