Petticoat Press # 10: Job's Troubles for Louisa Cheves McCord

Petticoat Press # 10: Job's Troubles for Louisa Cheves McCord 

by Becky Brown

Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord, 1810-1879

Sculptural portrait by Hiram Powers, 1859

Job's Troubles can represent Louisa Cheves McCord's career as a Southern fire-eater---a voice of the slave-holding South before and after the Civil War. She was afflicted with many troubles. During the war she lost her son, her brother and three nephews. She was widowed when she was 45 years old and her beloved father died of cognitive decline under her devoted care two years later.

Louisa was astounded when Sherman's occupying troops looted her Columbia house after leaving a warning note: “Ladies, I pity you. Leave this town.” 

Warnings were something Louisa had ignored throughout her life.  How could they, she later wrote, "as soldiers [bring] themselves to shell defenseless women and children in their beds." Defenseless Louisa was not. She, in fact, was one of the leading antebellum defenders of the South in her writing as representative not of just Southern womanhood but Southern culture, women's role and conservative economic and political philosophy.

Job's Troubles by Jeanne Arnieri

In 1852 Louisa's countered Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential attack on slavery in Life Among the Lowly (Uncle Tom's Cabin.) Louisa's essay was signed with her initials L.S.M., initials being a common byline.

"Make your laws to interfere with the God-established system of slavery, which our Southern States are beautifully developing to perfection, daily improving the condition of the slave...make your laws, we say, to pervert this God-directed course, and the world has yet to see the horrors which might ensue from it. The natural order of things perverted, ill must follow.....

"Mrs. Stowe has associated much, it would appear, with negroes, mulattoes and abolitionists; possibly, in her exalted dreams for the perfection of the race, she has forgotten the small punctilios of what, in the ordinary parlance of the world, is called decent society."

See her article here: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/reviews/rere113bt.html

The following year in answer to English critic the Duchess of Sutherland's complaints about slavery's cruelty Louisa was again the voice of the South in an article in the Charleston Mercury. "Christian slavery," she wrote, "[mingles] the graces and amenities of the highest Christian civilization."

In 1855 Sally Baxter wrote her friend English novelist William Makepeace Thackery about a visit to Louisa's home where the family was "as much the stronghold of the slavery party as the Adams faction is of the Abolitionists. Mrs. McCord is hotly engaged in the strife and almost all her feeling and intellect seem to be expended on that one topic, and she and her husband warmly espouse the cause in every paper and periodical to which they can get admission."

Job's Troubles by Becky Collis

Louisa published under a variety of pen names in periodicals such as DeBow's Review, The Southern Literary Gazette, the Southern Literary Messenger and The Southern Quarterly. Many readers recognized her anonymous articles and poetry by her style. No one has compiled a bibliography of her pre-War writing because of the anonymity of those bylines. Her manuscripts and papers were burned when fires were set as Sherman invaded Columbia and she burned many herself.

James Everett Kibler, Jr. in "The Illustrious Mrs. McCord: A Profile in 

Courage" described her political ideas: 

"She praised South Carolinians for their principles [in 1849], which she described as 'among the most conservative in the country' because they did not include man’s 'tinkerings' with God’s natural order that resulted in such new programs as 'the follies of socialism and communism.' She wrote, 'God directs and man perverts.' ....She railed at what she called 'the nauseous froth scum of sickly philanthropy.' "

https://columbiametro.com/article/the-illustrious-mrs-mccord/

Job's Troubles by Denniele Bohannon

Once the war she'd been advocating came to pass Louisa was indeed beset by troubles equal to the Biblical Job. During the war she lost five family members and her vision deteriorated. It may have been physical disabilities in her 50s that stopped her newspaper writing. (And the fact that newspapers required paper, ink, lead type etc., items in increasingly short supply in the Confederacy.)

Vicksburg's Daily Citizen printed issues on the reverse

 of wallpaper scraps in summer, 1863.

Louisa devoted her war time in Columbia to care for the wounded and to Confederate charities (and converse with her friend Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was quite in awe of her.) After the Confederate surrender she was restless at home, drifting to Canada and finding some solace in the women's monument societies, erecting the statues glorifying the Rebellion that are now being removed.

Job's Troubles by Elsie Ridgley

The Block

Job's Troubles is a fairly recent name for this classic star.

Just two large templates

Further Reading
A post on Louisa from Cassandra's Circle BOM:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/03/cassandras-circle-3-louisa-cheves.html

 
Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999)

Leigh Fought, Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa McCord, 1810-1879
Preview:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ym_JiBn3-XIC&dq=lottie+reynold+mccord&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Richard C. Lounsbury, Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography Letters.
Preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=O6P9wdZmBbQC&source=gbs_navlinks_s