Mary's world

by Richard N. Côté

"Born to affluence and opportunity in the South's Golden Age, Mary Motte Alston Pringle (1803-1884) represented the epitome of Southern white womanhood. Her husband, William, was a wealthy rice planter who owned four plantations and 337 slaves. Her thirteen children included two Harvard scholars, seven world travelers, three socialite daughters, a U.S. Navy war hero, six Confederate soldiers, one possible Union collaborator, a Confederate firebrand trapped in the North, an expatriate bon vivant in France, and two adventuresome California pioneers. Mary's World illuminates in lavish detail the world and psyche of this wealthy, well-educated, highly-principled nineteenth-century Southern planter's wife. This biography was drawn directly from over 2,500 pages of Mary's unpublished letters, journals and diaries, none of which, she could have imagined, would ever be read by strangers. Therein lies their power. In her own words, Mary tells us about the joys, sorrows, frustrations, and terror