Louisa Cheves McCord
When Louisa was a child, her family moved from place to place, as they followed Langdon Cheves's political career. He was the South Carolina attorney general before being appointed to the US House of Representatives, and he succeeded Henry Clay as Republican Speaker of the House. He declined cabinet and Supreme Court appointments to become president of the Bank of the United States.
In 1829, the Cheves’ returned to live in South Carolina permanently. Louisa’s father became a wealthy planter, owning four plantations and three hundred slaves.
Her mother died young, leaving her responsible for the household and the younger children. Although her sister soon married, Louisa remained at home and cared for her father and siblings after her mother's death.
When Louisa was finally ready to marry, at the age of thirty, Langdon Cheves gave her a plantation in her own name, “Lang Syne” cotton plantation in Columbia, South Carolina.
She married politician and attorney David James McCord in 1840. He was thirteen years her senior, a widower whose first wife had died after bearing thirteen children. Louisa refused to become a stepmother to her husband's children from that marriage.
Louisa gave birth to three children. She supervised her plantation and largely supported the family, but she found her greatest fulfillment in writing. Her published works include a play, a book of poetry, and many essays.
Although she had begun writing before her marriage, it was only afterward that she began to publish her work. Being a married woman meant that she had more freedom to publish her writings without becoming a social outcast.
In her essays, she vehemently supported slavery and the subjugation of women, believing that women should be educated but should not enter public life, that “woman was made for duty, not for fame.” She believed that it was a woman's duty to sacrifice her own ambitions and desires for the good of her family and society.
Most of her essays appeared anonymously or with only her initials, because women writers weren’t taken seriously, and her contemporaries would have considered it highly indelicate for a woman to write about such controversial issues.
Louisa’s life was a paradox. Her personal experiences did not reflect the social ideals she advocated in her writing. She supported the social subordination of women, but also sought a public voice for herself. She cultivated and maintained an active intellectual life by associating with the faculty of South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina).
Family tragedy struck Louisa repeatedly in the late 1850s, and brought her writing career to an abrupt end. Her husband, David, died suddenly in May 1855. Her grief from his death hadn’t subsided when, in August 1855, her brother Charles succumbed to “country fever,” one of the many epidemics that hit the plantations every summer.
Langdon Cheves was so distraught over the loss of his son that he suffered a stroke, and never fully recovered. Louisa brought her father to live with her and served as his caretaker until his death a year and a half later. After his death, Louisa worked tirelessly to honor her father’s memory, commissioning a statue of him for the South Carolina State House.
A lawsuit contesting Langdon Cheves’s will pitted the remaining siblings against each other in a bitter rivalry, destroying his family in the process. Louisa fell into a deep depression from which she was finally lifted by the challenges of the Civil War.
She threw all of her resources into the defense of the Confederacy. She donated horses, slave labor, and time. She assumed the presidency of the Soldier's Relief Association and the Ladies' Clothing Association. She served as matron of the army hospital on the campus of South Carolina College.
Most of the men in Louisa’s extended family died for the Southern cause. After her only son was killed at the Battle of Bull Run, her friend, diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, wrote, “She is dedicating her grief for her son...by giving up her soul and body, her days and nights, to the wounded soldiers.”
In February 1865, Louisa was still living in Columbia, when General William Tecumseh Sherman approached the city. The Union army marched into her Columbia home and seized it for the headquarters of General Oliver O. Howard, while Louisa blocked the staircase to protect the women who were hiding on the second floor.
The war ended, and so did slavery. Louisa relinquished the management of her plantation to a son-in-law, and fled to Ontario rather than take the oath of allegiance to the Union government, hoping that a visit to relatives there might alleviate another deep depression.
The arrival of grandchildren finally raised her spirits. She returned to the United States and spent the rest of her life with her daughter in Charleston. Just as she was settling into a peaceful old age, she fell ill with “gout in the stomach.”
Louisa Cheves McCord died at the age of sixty-nine in 1879.
Few of her personal documents survived the Civil War—her slaveholding records were destroyed, and she didn’t leave a diary. So it is quite difficult to reach a conclusion about her life. It seems to me that she was constantly battling with her own desires, attempting to make a comfortable place for herself in Southern society, while also trying to live up to what the men in her family expected of her. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
Copyright © 2007 Maggie MacLean
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