CHARLESTON, S. C., March 26, 1861....
John Chesnut is a pretty soft-hearted slave-owner. He had two negroes arrested for selling whisky to his people on his plantation, and buying stolen corn from them. The culprits in jail sent for him. He found them (this snowy weather) lying in the cold on a bare floor, and he thought that punishment enough; they having had weeks of it. But they were not satisfied to be allowed to evade justice and slip away. They begged of him (and got) five dollars to buy shoes to run away in. I said: "Why, this is flat compounding a felony." And Johnny put his hands in the armholes of his waistcoat and stalked majestically before me, saying, "Woman, what do you know about law?"

Mrs. Reynolds stopped the carriage one day to tell me Kitty Boykin was to be married to Savage Heyward. He has only ten children already. These people take the old Hebrew pride in the number of children they have. This is the true colonizing spirit. There is no danger of crowding here and inhabitants are wanted. Old Colonel Chesnut 1 said one day: "Wife, you must feel that you have not been useless in your day and generation. You have now twenty-seven great-grandchildren."

Wednesday. - I have been mobbed by my own house servants. Some of them are at the plantation, some hired out at the Camden hotel, some are at Mulberry. They agreed to come in a body and beg me to stay at home to keep my own house once more, "as I ought not to have them scattered and distributed every which way." I had not been a month in Camden since 1858. So a house there would be for their benefit solely, not mine. I asked my cook if she lacked anything on the plantation at the Hermitage. "Lack anything?" she said, "I lack everything. What are corn-meal, bacon, milk, and molasses? Would that be all you wanted? Ain't I been living and eating exactly as you does all these years? When I cook for you, didn't I have some of all? Dere, now!" Then she doubled herself up laughing. They all shouted, "Missis, we is crazy for you to stay home."

April 15th. - I did not know that one could live such days of excitement. Some one called: "Come out! There is a crowd coming." A mob it was, indeed, but it was headed by Colonels Chesnut and Manning. The crowd was shouting and showing these two as messengers of good news. They were escorted to Beauregard's headquarters. Fort Sumter had surrendered! Those upon the housetops shouted to us, "The fort is on fire."
July 22d. - Mrs. Davis came in so softly that I did not know she was here until she leaned over me and said: "A great battle has been fought [First Bull Run]. Joe Johnston led the right wing, and Beauregard the left wing of the army. Your husband is all right. Wade Hampton is wounded. Colonel Johnston of the Legion killed; so are Colonel Bee and Colonel Bartow. Kirby Smith is wounded or killed." I had no breath to speak; she went on in that desperate, calm way, to which people betake themselves under the greatest excitement: "Bartow, rallying his men, leading them into the hottest of the light, died gallantly at the head of his regiment. The President telegraphs me only that 'it is a great victory.' General Cooper has all the other telegrams."

Still I said nothing; I was stunned; then I was so grateful. Those nearest and dearest to me were safe still. She then began, in the same concentrated voice, to read from a paper she held in her hand: "Dead and dying cover the field. Sherman's battery taken. Lynchburg regiment cut to pieces. Three hundred of the Legion wounded."

That got me up. Times were too wild with excitement to stay in bed. We went into Mrs. Preston's room, and she made me lie down on her bed. Men, women, and children streamed in. Every living soul had a story to tell. "Complete victory," you heard everywhere. We had been such anxious wretches. The revulsion of feeling was almost too much to bear.

July 27th. Trescott says this victory will be our ruin. It lulls us into a fool's paradise of conceit at our superior valor, and the shameful farce of their flight will wake every inch of their manhood. It was the very fillip they needed. There are a quieter sort here who know their Yankees well. They say if the thing begins to pay - government contracts, and all that - we will never hear the end of it, at least, until they get their pay in some way out of us. They will not lose money by us. Of that we may be sure. Trust Yankee shrewdness and vim for that.

COLUMBIA, S. C., February 20, 1862. - Had an appetite for my dainty breakfast. Always breakfast in bed now. But then, my Mercury contained such bad news. That is an appetizing style of matutinal newspaper. Fort Donelson has fallen, but no men fell with it. It is prisoners for them that we can not spare, or prisoners for us that we may not be able to feed: that is so much to be "forefended," as Keitt says. They lost six thousand, we two thousand; I grudge that proportion. In vain, alas! ye gallant few - few, but undismayed. Again, they make a stand. We have Buckner, Beauregard, and Albert Sidney Johnston. With such leaders and God's help we may be saved from the hated Yankees; who knows?

Nov. 28, 1863 - Mr. Davis visited Charleston and had an enthusiastic reception. He described it all to General Preston. Governor Aiken's perfect old Carolina style of living delighted him. Those old gray-haired darkies and their noiseless, automatic service, the result of finished training--one does miss that sort of thing when away from home, where your own servants think for you; they know your ways and your wants; they save you all responsibility even in matters of your own ease and well doing. The butler at Mulberry would be miserable and feel himself a ridiculous failure were I ever forced to ask him for anything.

November 30th. - Anxiety pervades. Lee is fighting Meade. Misery is everywhere. Bragg is falling back before Grant. Longstreet, the soldiers call him Peter the Slow, is settling down before Knoxville. General Lee requires us to answer every letter, said Mr. Venable, and to do our best to console the poor creatures whose husbands and sons are fighting the battles of the country.

Dec. 2 - The first of December we went with a party of Mrs. Ould's getting up, to see a French frigate which lay at anchor down the river. The French officers came on board our boat. The Lees were aboard. The French officers were not in the least attractive either in manners or appearance, but our ladies were most attentive and some showered bad French upon them with a lavish hand, always accompanied by queer grimaces to eke out the scanty supply of French words, the sentences ending usually in a nervous shriek. "Are they deaf?" asked Mrs. Randolph.

The French frigate was a dirty little thing. Doctor Garnett was so buoyed up with hope that the French were coming to our rescue, that he would not let me say "an English man-of-war is the cleanest thing known in the world." Captain - said to Mary Lee, with a foreign contortion of countenance, that went for a smile, "I's bashlor." Judge Ould said, as we went to dinner on our own steamer, "They will not drink our President's health. They do not acknowledge us to be a nation. Mind, none of you say 'Emperor,' not once." Doctor Garnett interpreted the laws of politeness otherwise, and stepped forward, his mouth fairly distended with so much French, and said: "Vieff l'Emperor." Young Gibson seconded him quietly, "À la santé de l'Empereur." But silence prevailed. Preston Hampton was the handsomest man on board - "the figure of Hercules, the face of Apollo," cried an enthusiastic girl. Preston was as lazy and as sleepy as ever. He said of the Frenchmen: "They can't help not being good-looking, but with all the world open to them, to wear such shabby clothes!"

The lieutenant's name was Rousseau. On the French frigate, lying on one of the tables was a volume of Jean Jacques Rousseau's works, side by side, strange to say, with a map of South Carolina. This lieutenant was courteously asked by Mary Lee to select some lady to whom she might introduce him. He answered: "I shuse you," with a bow that was a benediction and a prayer.

And now I am in a fine condition for Hetty Cary's starvation party, where they will give thirty dollars for the music and not a cent for a morsel to eat. Preston said contentedly, "I hate dancing, and I hate cold water; so I will eschew the festivity to-night."

Found John R. Thompson at our house when I got home so tired to-night. He brought me the last number of the Cornhill. He knew how much I was interested in Trollope's story, Framley Parsonage.

August 22d. [1864] - Hope I may never know a raid except from hearsay. Mrs. Huger describes the one at Athens. The proudest and most timid of women were running madly in the streets, corsets in one hand, stockings in the other- déshabillé as far as it will go, Mobile is half taken. The railroad between us and Richmond has been tapped.

Notes from a letter written by a young lady who is riding a high horse. Her fiancé, a maimed hero, has been abused. "You say to me with a sneer, 'So you love that man.' Yes, I do, and I thank God that I love better than all the world the man who is to be my husband. 'Proud of him, are you?' Yes, I am, in exact proportion to my love. You say, ' I am selfish.' Yes, I am selfish. He is my second self, so utterly absorbed am I in him. There is not a moment, day or night, that I do not think of him. In point of fact, I do not think of anything else." No reply was deemed necessary by the astounded recipient of this outburst of indignation, who showed me the letter and continued to observe: "Did you ever? She seems so shy, so timid, so cold."