Life
Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, on her maternal grandparents' plantation, called Mount Pleasant, near Stateburg, South Carolina, in the High Hills of Santee. Her parents were Mary Boykin (1804–85) and Stephen Decatur Miller (1788–1838), who had served as a U.S. Representative. In 1829 he was elected governor of South Carolina and in 1831 as a U.S. Senator. The family then lived in Charleston. Mary was the oldest of four children; she had a younger brother Stephen and two sisters: Catherine and Sarah Amelia.
At age 12, Miller began her formal education in Charleston, where she boarded at Mme. Talvande's French School for Young Ladies, which attracted daughters from the elite of the planter class. Talvande was among the many French colonial refugees who had settled in Charleston from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) after its Revolution. Miller became fluent in French and German, and received a strong education.
Leaving politics, her father took his family to Mississippi where he bought extensive acreage. It was a crude, rough frontier compared to Charleston. He owned three cotton plantations and hundreds of slaves. Mary lived in Mississippi for short periods between school terms but was much more fond of the city.
Read more about this topic: Mary Boykin Chesnut
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The goal in raising one’s child is to enable him, first, to discover who he wants to be, and then to become a person who can be satisfied with himself and his way of life. Eventually he ought to be able to do in his life whatever seems important, desirable, and worthwhile to him to do; to develop relations with other people that are constructive, satisfying, mutually enriching; and to bear up well under the stresses and hardships he will unavoidably encounter during his life.”
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“Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.”
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“Time, fall no more.
Let that be life time falls no more. The threat
Of time we in our own courage have forsworn.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)