Early Life and Education
Mary Elizabeth was born as the youngest daughter of five to Margaret Mackall Smith and Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, then on the frontier. She also had a younger brother Richard. She and her siblings grew up alternately at their plantation in Louisville and United States Army forts, where her father, a career Army officer, was often in command. Her mother mostly taught the children at home, sometimes with the help of tutors or young officers at forts. In the late 1820s, the family moved to a plantation near Baton Rouge, as her father was purchasing land in Louisiana.
In the early 1830s, the family was with Taylor at Fort Crawford as he waged the Black Hawk War. Later they returned to Baton Rouge when he went to Florida for the Seminole War and to Texas.
Read more about this topic: Mary Elizabeth Bliss
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
—Joyce Cary (1888–1957)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)