“A Diary From Dixie” is Mary Boykin Chesnut’s celebrated firsthand account of life in the Confederate South during the Civil War years of 1861-1865. Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate Senator and Brigadier General described the life of an upper-class planter society confronting the encroaching realities of the end of slavery and her peers’ way of life. Full of important personages and eminently re...