What does the following quote mean?"The color of slaves--that is all--the misery of poverty, alike everywhere, only a person can be beaten with...

The excerpt has many different layers to it.  Chesnut's
diary really strives to bring many layers of complexity to the challenges and situations
brought out by the Civil War conflict.  In this particular section, Chesnut had read
writings that predicted a "glorious rise of Southern Confederacy," and is contrasting it
with the horrors of the Civil War.   When she writes, "the reality is hideous and an
agony," it is a statement contrasting the Southern hopes with the realistic conditions
that confront them.  At the same time, she mentions another work preceding the quote
about poverty in England.  It is from this that we get the quote.  The meaning of it is
to broaden the struggle for being heard to all people.  When she writes that "the color
of slaves" is akin to "the misery of poverty everywhere," it helps to bring out the idea
that there is a universality of struggle in the conflict that Chesnut recognizes.  We
understand that she has broadened the struggle as the acknowledgement of voices of
suffering when she writes after the quote, "Whenever there is a cry of pain, I on the
side of the one who cries."  In this light, the quote seeks to make the struggle of the
Civil War as one of people who wished to be heard and cried in order to have their voice
acknowledged.  In her diary, Chesnut recognizes this.