Louisa Susannah Cheves McCord (December 3, 1810 – November 23, 1879) was an American plantation owner and author from South Carolina, best known as a political essayist who wrote on free trade. Between 1848 and 1856, she authored some thirteen essays and a play, Caius Gracchus, appeared in print, in which McCord articulated a defense of slavery as well as a conservative view of women's place in society.
The daughter of Langdon Cheves, she was born in 1810 in South Carolina and educated in Philadelphia. In 1840, she married David James McCord, becoming a widow in 1855. She mainly resided in Columbia, South Carolina.
McCord was active as an author from the 1840s onward, and her production is regarded as an important contribution to Southern literature of the Antebellum era. McCord's writings consisted principally of essays and reviews, and she wrote well on the subject of political economy. Her published volumes included, My Dreams, a volume of poems published in Philadelphia in 1848; Sophisms of the Protective Policy. A translation from the French of Bastiat, published in New York in 1848; and Caius Gracchus. A five-act tragedy, published in New York in 1851. McCord was a contributor to the Southern Quarterly Review and the Southern Literary Messenger beginning in 1849. Henry Timrod, Paul Hamilton Hayne, William Gilmore Simms, William Henry Trescot, Requier and James Matthews Legaré were her contemporaries; some were personal friends.
Louisa Susannah Cheves was born December 3, 1810 in Charleston to Langdon Cheves and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Dulles.
Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Cheves, came from Aberdeen, Scotland, to the United States in the latter half of the 18th century. He married Mary Langdon, a daughter of Dr. Thomas Langdon of Virginia. They settled in the frontier country of South Carolina in what later became Abbeville County. Here, during a Native American raid on September 17, 1776, in a blockhouse where the people had taken refuge from the Native Americans, Langdon Cheves was born, the father of Louisa McCord. Her maternal grandfather, Joseph Dulles, a native of Dublin, came to the U.S. during the same period in which Alexander Cheves had come. He married Sophia, the daughter of Colonel William Heatley of St. Matthew's parish, South Carolina, and his wife, Maria Louisa Courtonne, the daughter of a Huguenot pastor. Their daughter, Mary Elizabeth, became the wife of Langdon Cheves. Of this union, Louisa was the first-born.
The early years of Louisa Cheves' life were closely influenced by her father's interests and surroundings. In October 1810 (the year of her birth), Langdon Cheves was elected from the Charleston Congressional District to Congress, where he took his seat in session with Lowndes, Williams and Calhoun, forming an integral factor of that group of Southern statesmen whose opinions express a distinct school of political purpose and constitutional interpretation in U.S. history. In 1814, Clay was appointed to the Ghent Commission and in the vacancy created by his absence, Cheves was made Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, a position he held until 1816. From 1816 to 1819, he was Judge of the South Carolina Circuit Court. During these years, Louisa was a little child. When she was nine years old, Langdon Cheves was called to adjust the financial difficulties of the United States Bank at Philadelphia.
At this time, his two daughters, Louisa and Sophia, the latter of whom became Mrs. Charles Thompson Haskell, were sent to the school of a Mr. Grimshaw, an Irishman then living in Philadelphia. Later the sisters were placed under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Picot, French refugees with whom they continued to study for several years, becoming thoroughly conversant with the French language. Subsequently, the girls were introduced to Washington and Philadelphia society. It had not been her father's intention to educate his daughters in any other way than that usually given women in that day—a lighter academic course, with a "finishing school" for French, astronomy, and so forth. The graces of education were stressed rather than fundamentals. But Louisa early developed a passion for mathematics, and stated that a girl with such a love of knowledge should have every opportunity to perfect herself not only in mathematics, but also in other branches of study not then usually undertaken by women. She was then given just the same mathematical instruction that her brothers received. In this her education was unusual. In her father's study and at his table she met and heard the discourse of men whose speech expressed national policies, whose style, both in written and in spoken English, is classic. Her father's contemporaries were Webster, Calhoun, Clay and their associates. Political economy was the gospel of their theories. The young girl, hearing them express their theories, learned to think deeply on political issues. Her father's secession theory influenced Louisa and largely determined her mature writing.
During a part of this period, the Cheves family lived in "Abbeville," outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After a residence here of about eight years, the family then retired to South Carolina.
As a young woman, Louisa Cheves came into the possession of Lang Syne Plantation, formerly belonging to a great-aunt, Mrs. Lovell, a daughter of Colonel William Heatley. "Lang Syne" was in St. Matthew's parish, on the Congaree River near Fort Motte, South Carolina, about 30 miles (48 km) from Columbia.
In May 1840, she married David James McCord of Columbia, South Carolina, a prominent lawyer, public speaker, writer/editor of the "Statutes at large of South Carolina", and a frequent contributor to the Southern Quarterly Review, writing on Free Trade. David McCord died in 1855.
In the year 1848, McCord published her first book of poetry, My Dreams, a collection of fugitive poems from the press of Carey & Hart, Philadelphia. A close study of these poems reveals a genuine poetic talent, but there is not the certainty of maturity, nor the metrical perfection of first-rate poetry. The lyrist is an honestly doubting lyrist in many passages. There are a number of them that are either of adolescent composition, withheld until 1848 for publication, or at least of adolescent conception, possibly worked over for this volume. Hope is the keynote of a majority of the poems in this collection; but in many instances the hope is unaccompanied by any certainty of faith, such as a woman of McCord's full life and wide experience must have developed at the time this collection was published. A few of the poems are narrative myths, a direct reflection of her classic temperament. They suggest early Greek myths, and meet the reader with such titles as "The Daughters of Hope," who are cleverly personified as Fancy and Happiness; Happiness being lost in Life's confusion, Fancy assists her mother, Hope, to chase Happiness through all time. Other poems include "The Falling Star," "Love, Wisdom, Folly," "The Comet," "The Star That Followed Me," "Conduct of the Sources of Good and Evil," "The Home of Hope" and "The Voice of a Star." Then there is a grouping possible among them of simple narratives of the world of concrete things. For example, the pathetic "Poor Nannie" and "The Blood Stained Rose," "The Birth of the Evergreens" and "Pretty Fanny." But it is in the third division of these poems that McCord's maturity expresses her feelings, and in the poems of this group deals with the eternal riddle of life and death. They suggest the suffering spirit. "My Dream Child," "The Village Churchyard," "The First Beam of Light," "My Dead," "Ye're Born to Die" and others are found here.
It was not until three years later, in 1851, that McCord essayed a longer poetic effort in Caius Gracchus, a tragedy in five acts. This showed a maturity and a greater care in preparation. The main source of the plot is the story of the Gracchi, which McCord follows rather closely. The play was probably never intended for the stage; it belongs to that class of classic closet dramas that were in vogue in the first half of the 19th century. The character interpretation is probably the strongest and most valuable part of the work. Caius is heroic and his young wife is as winsome as a Roman girl could well be; the mob in its vacillations is accurately drawn, and Cornelia is a masterpiece. The probability is that the real Cornelia was a favorite heroine of McCord's. Their lives bear similarities in biography; they were called upon to make supreme sacrifices that were identical, and they endured with similar silent heroism.