Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord (1810-1879) was one of the most remarkable figures in the intellectual history of antebellum America. A conservative intellectual, she broke the confines of Southern gender roles. Over the past decade historians have begun to pay attention to McCord and find her indespensible to understanding American culture. Among Southerners before the Civil War, she is ranked with Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, Sarah Grimke, John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and Frederick Douglass. This volume collects all of her poetry, drama, and correspondence, her account of Sherman's occupation of Columbia, and a memoir of her father, politician and statesman Langdon Cheves. Its publication, together with the previously published Louisa S. McCord: Poltical and Social Essays, makes available all of Louisa McCords's varied writings.
Breaking the confines of Southern gender roles through her outspoken conservative writings, Louisa McCord became one of the most remarkable intellectual figures in antebellum America. This is a selection of her best-known and most significant pieces ranging from poetry to correspondence.
Southern Womanhood and Slavery is the first full-length biography of Louisa S. McCord, one of the most intriguing intellectuals in antebellum America. The daughter of South Carolina planter and politician Langdon Cheves, and an essayist in her own right, McCord supported unregulated free trade and the perpetuation of slavery and opposed the advancement of women’s rights. This study examines the origins of her ideas. Leigh Fought constructs an exciting narrative that follows McCord from her childhood as the daughter of a state representative and president of the Bank of the United States through her efforts to accept her position as wife and mother, her career as an author and plantation mistress, and the Union invasion of South Carolina during the Civil War, to the end of her life in the emerging New South. Fought analyzes McCord’s poetry, letters, and essays in an effort to comprehend her acceptance of slavery and the submission of women. Fought concludes that McCord came to a defense of slavery through her experience with free labor in the North, which also reinforced her faith in the paternalist model for preserving social order. McCord’s life as a writer on “unfeminine” subjects, her reputation as strong-minded and masculine, her late marriage, her continued ownership of her plantation after marriage, and her position as the matron of a Civil War hospital contradicted her own philosophy that women should remain the quiet force behind their husbands. She lived during a time of social flux in which free labor, slavery, and the role of women underwent dramatic changes, as well as a time that enabled her to discover and pursue her intellectual ambitions. Fought examines the conflict that resulted when those ambitions clashed with McCord’s role as a woman in the society of the South. McCord’s voice was an interesting, articulate, and necessary feminine addition to antebellum white ideology. Moreover, her story demonstrates the ways in which southern women negotiated through patriarchy without surrendering their sense of self or disrupting the social order. Engaging and very readable, Southern Womanhood and Slavery will be of special interest to students of southern history and women’s studies, as well as to the general reader.
This volume includes her essays on slavery, secession, women's role, and political economy, fully annotated, along with an Introduction by Michael O'Brien, Chair of the Editorial Board of the Southern Texts Society.
Abstract: A proslavery advocate and anti-suffrage rhetorician, Louisa McCord's writing serves as an interesting example of the types of arguments advanced as foundational fictions of both "race" and "womanhood," explicitly conveying the personal stakes she had in slavery and the racial economy of meaning supporting the southern slaveocracy. Whether addressing the issues of slavery, women, theoretical equality, racial superiority, abolition, or the economy, McCord structured her arguments around essentialized binary oppositions. Ultimately, all of McCord's arguments rested upon tropes of race. McCord's writings operate along explicit constructions of blackness, womanhood, and implicitly whiteness, signifying upon a relatively new tradition of essentialist racial discourses. These socially constructed discourses, essentialized notions of race and gender which I refer to as foundational fictions, remain central to McCord's writing, serving as the context around and from which she builds her arguments. Employing the tools of both intertextual and intersectional methods of analysis, I engage in an interrogation of McCord's work in order to determine how the writings of McCord contributed to the construction of foundational fictions which consciously influenced racial economies of meaning prior to the Civil War, fictions which continue to carry currency within the national imagination. Ultimately this thesis focuses on the (de)construction of essentialized identities, calling into question the imperative to create, bring into being, disempowering differences which have resulted in very real material inequalities among persons differentially situated within the American social context.
