The first, in 1905, carried the names of two Southern women, Isabella D. Martin and Myrta L. Avary. They were nominal editors only. Someone in the publishing house picked what he wanted to use, divided the entries into chapters and gave them titles, rewrote the introduction, composed footnotes, and hastily copy-edited the result, which appeared under the title A Diary From Dixie. Ben Ames Williams learned of Mrs. Chesnut from, that volume, used her as a figure in a Civil War romance entitled A House Divided, and then—after discovering her manuscript version of the 1880’s and some fragments of the original journal—decided to prepare a new edition, also called A Diary From Dixie. But he was a novelist, and when he didn’t like the way she wrote things, he rewrote them, without any warning to the reader.

One of the intellectual challenges of this job was to see the extent to which hindsight affected her views—something it was possible to examine by comparing portions prepared as much as two decades apart. I’d like to answer your question by reading a paragraph from my introduction: “The editor...began in a spirit of skepticism, with misgivings that it would become his duty to expose inconsistencies, anachronisms, distortions, hindsights, and special pleadings that would raise doubts about the worth and integrity of a famous book and its author. Well before the completion of the long task, however, a growing respect for the author and the integrity of her work began to replace the original misgivings. Given the kinds of liberties she took in revising and expanding the original Journal...Mary Chesnut can be said to have shown an unusual sense of responsibility toward the history she records and a reassuring faithfulness to perceptions...in her original Journal. It would be a regrettable and most ironic outcome of this effort to reveal the true nature of her work and an accurate text of what she wrote if it all resulted in lowering the esteem in which her work was held.”

No. And most diaries, I think, get some of that before they get into print. But she had gifts as a writer. I think of the diary as a literary work. It evokes the color and the passion, the feelings that

How consciously I’m not sure. Edmund Wilson called that particular episode a metaphor for the decline of the Confederacy, and I think that she is aware, as a writer, of what she is doing. But I have never, in the diary or in her correspondence, caught her out in an error on this or other relationships.

Those feelings are prominent and conspicuous in the work, and they give a surprising degree of contemporaneity to her attitudes, particularly about the patriarchy that is so dominant. She’s in full rebellion against it.

She was thoroughly aware of it. Time after time she says, “If only I were a man.” One thing she wanted very badly, as a cultivated woman, was a diplomatic appointment for her husband to France—or as a second choice, to Great Britain. And she says: “If only Jeff. Davis would appoint me minister to Paris.” She knew her own capacities and had contempt for the men who were in charge.

No. She had her limitations. She undoubtedly was unsympathetic to slavery—you remember the well-known passage where she calls it a “monstrous system”—felt it was a disgrace, was glad that it was finished. But she never departed from the prevailing attitudes on race.

Mary spoke of herself and her shortcomings and vanities with a great deal of candor, but there are limits, and when those limits are reached, one suppresses. My process was to put things back in when I thought them relevant. When she excludes something I think the reader ought to know to understand a passage, I put it back in. But in this I run head on into the editorial purists’ canon that you respect the writer’s wishes. That’s a literary obligation that I feel very strongly. But I also have an obligation as a historian to tell the reader what happened. And these two can’t always be reconciled. I admit that. So I sometimes simply intrude with things she rejected, mostly material that makes her appear vain, ridiculous, or too ambitious. For example, when she learned that Davis had let her down by

Not exactly by design. I started as an English teacher at Georgia Tech after getting my bachelor’s degree at Emory. Then I got interested in doing a book on Tom Watson [the Georgia Populist leader who began political life as a radical and ended it as an archreactionary]. The materials were at the University of North Carolina, and I got a fellowship to work on them as a doctoral candidate in history. That decided things.

They’re basically just new tools. They don’t change the essential job of the historian—that is, to unearth and interpret the past.

In the sense that both movements had their peak and their decline, yes. We’re on a declining slope, perhaps, from the crest in the late 1960’s. I don’t, however, feel that there’s been the aggressive renunciation that there was in the earlier Reconstruction. There has simply been a slackening of commitment and a diminishing of attention, not an overt and violent reaction as there was in the 1870’s and 1880’s.

Well, “populism” ranks with “democracy” as one of those sloppily used words that is so mishandled in popular speech that I don’t think t’s definable at all. It has a specific meaning in American political history as the name of a party. I used to quarrel with Dick Hofstadter about the way I thought he turned it into a synonym for reaction in a nonhistorical way.

That is the acme of anachronism. No. There is a good deal of talk of that kind, but in the society we have it’s largely fantasy, I think. There is some feasibility to the idea of the participation of the

Well, the mood is certainly different from what it was in the 1950’s, when those essays were written. We were riding the crest of the euphoria of the victory of the forties. Troubles were undoubtedly coming, and I thought we’d better sober up and confront them. Have we learned lessons from Vietnam? The ultimate ones or the right ones? No, I don’t think so. But we’ve realized that our national power is limited, that we don’t always succeed in our crusades, and that we were much too hopeful about the consequences of a Pax Americana than we had any right to be.

It’s very different now. The old party system has vanished and I think we’re on the eve of some pretty drastic readjustment in the vacuum the parties left. Party history isn’t at the center of things any more; we’re in transit. But the alliance you speak of had a lot to do with our history through the New Deal period.

No. That era has been laid to rest. People think they’re living in it but they’re not.

Yes, they learn the wrong lessons and acquire the wrong morals from the story.

They can ply their own trade. And hope for the best. I doubt if they can straighten things out in the world.