The Preparation
In the beautiful old-world city of Charleston, South Carolina, on December 3, 1810, Louisa Susanna, daughter of Langdon Cheves and Mary Elizabeth Dulles, was born. By ancestry1 she was destined to be a person of strength of conviction and richness of imagination. Her paternal grandfather, Alexander Cheves, came from Aberdeen, Scotland, to this country in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He married Mary Langdon, a daughter of Dr. Thomas Langdon, of Virginia. They settled in the frontier country of South Carolina in what is now Abbeville county. Here, during an Indian raid on September 17, 1776, in a block house where the people had taken refuge from the Indians, Langdon Cheves was born. This child of British emigration and of frontier hardships became the father of Louisa McCord. Her maternal grandfather, Joseph Dulles, a native of Dublin, came to this country 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. Thus were combined the solidity and tenacity of the Scotch temperament with the "passionate persistency to a moral ideal" and the charm and versatility of poetic Ireland. Of this union Louisa was the first-born. There is no doubt that she inherited her intellectual ability from her father, of whom Petigru said: "The leading characteristics of his mind were power and grandeur.
