38

Chapter TwoDaughter

The experiences of Margaret Wickliffe Preston as a daughter relate to her political

and economic power. Historians now recognize that political history and historical

family relations are interrelated. For example, Republican motherhood and the “cult of

true womanhood” expressed political ideologies. In describing a society which used

dualistic concepts of domestic and public spheres, historians often fail to include the

political influence of women, certainly not that of daughters, in tracing male political

activities. However, elite women played a political role, and their presence and influence

must be included in the political story.1 Notwithstanding the patriarchal nature of the

society around them, upper-class women functioned from a power base not accessible to

the majority of nineteenth century women. Daughters helped link the political and

economic power of families across the generations.2 The elite kin took special care about

whom they married, and they determined what property holdings their daughters brought

to marriage--either to merge as larger plantations or to keep as separate estates.

MWPreston grew up keenly aware of her class, race, and gender roles in both the

formal and experiential family settings.3 Her extended family was deeply enmeshed in

political and legal controversies, discourses that crossed gender and racial boundaries.

She knew that her family and class expected her to hone a feminine charm within a

Southern elite culture and to successfully maintain her kin’s station in an upper-class

society that transcended state and even national boundaries. She learned how to read

both “public” and “hidden” transcripts, and to join in with her own “politics of disguise

39

and anonymity.”4 White Victorian families, especially wealthy cosmopolitans, did not

function in reality in the idealized ways put forth in public rhetoric and prescriptive

literature.5 MWPreston and both her mothers, her biological mother, Margaretta Howard

Wickliffe, and her step-mother, Mary Owen Todd Russell Wickliffe, functioned as

independent agents within a conservative elitism to maintain their families’ racial and

class status. Rather than conform to a dichotomous model of patriarchal oppression

wherein women play the victim to white male oppression, these powerful women

functioned at various times as both oppressors and as the oppressed.6

In order to understand MWPreston’s source of power, some background relating

to her family and status needs to be provided. She was born on the 24th of March 1819,7

probably in the main house at Howard’s Grove, her mother’s family estate north of

Lexington.8 She, her six siblings, and her parents Robert and Margaretta Preston

Howard Wickliffe lived in the summertime at Ellerslie, a renovated mansion built by

General Levi Todd on a large farm several miles east of Lexington.9 When they lived in

town during the winter social season, they lived in a mansion at the corner of Second and

Market Streets just down from the Episcopal Christ Church where her father served as a

member of the vestry. Robert Wickliffe, a plucky young lawyer whose parents

immigrated to Bardstown from Pennsylvania, had been lucky to marry the daughter of a

large landowner. But he brought with him into the marriage the ambition and wit needed

to succeed in the land speculations and real estate law of frontier Kentucky. Wickliffe

studied with George Nicholas, the father of the first Kentucky constitution and head of

the Bar, and only one year after his marriage to Margaretta Howard, he was appointed the

40

U.S. attorney for Kentucky. This was only the beginning of a long and tumultuous career

during which he became the largest slaveowner in Kentucky. His manners were so

“courtly” and his bearing so impressive, that he was popularly known as the Old Duke of

Fayette County.10

MWPreston was the youngest child of seven and rarely saw her mother.

Margaretta Wickliffe often traveled to Virginia and Kentucky spas to find a cure for the

illnesses which afflicted her during her forties, and she left her youngest children with her

sister Sally at Howard’s Grove. She died in 1825, at the age of 47, having birthed at least

nine children within a span of twenty years. Upon her death her youngest living child,

MWPreston, was five years old and her eldest, Charles, was nineteen.11 A year later,

Robert Wickliffe married another heiress, the widow Mary (“Polly”) Owen Todd Russell,

and MWPreston became the adored favorite of her step-mother. The family soon moved

to Glendower, a mansion situated on several acres of orchards and landscaped gardens on

the western side of Lexington.12 Later in life, MWPreston spoke of how much she loved

her step-mother, but rarely gave particulars other than the repeated references to her

step-mother as “the best friend” she ever had.13 The role of white middle-class women as

mothers and daughters figured heavily in the advice literature and domestic fiction of the

day and emphasized the moral responsibility of the mother to her children. Polly

Wickliffe might have functioned in this way, but the evidence points more directly to her

role as instructor in appropriate etiquette for her step-daughters’ elite social standing and

as a key player in garnering proper spouses for her step-children. The first step in this

process was to make sure that they were adequately schooled.

41

MWPreston lived in a household filled with political and economic oriented

journals: her father subscribed to the Ky. Statesman, National Intelligencer, both the

Louisville and the Cincinnati Journal, Observer and Reporter, the Ky. Yeoman, and the

Franklin Farmer.14 Perhaps she never read many of them, but the “Old Duke” was

clearly not the only one to read The African Repository, a monthly magazine which

described the efforts of the American Colonization Society in Liberia. The Wickliffe

girls probably read it with their step-mother. Former slaves wrote to the Wickliffes from

Africa and referred to MWPreston and her older sisters as girls: the daughters of the pro-

slavery “Old Duke” and the step-daughters of the emancipationist “Mrs. Polly” must

have experienced concern for black Kentuckians in the newly created Liberia.15 The

Wickliffe women most likely also read the Harbinger: it emphasized social reform and

focused on literary and musical criticism.16 Polly Wickliffe subscribed also to Western

Luminary which the Lexingtonian Thomas T. Skillman had begun in 1824 as an

interdenominational effort to encourage benevolency.17

The bills for MWPreston’s schooling list her required texts and show that she got

a well-rounded an education. At age eight she and her ten year old sister, Mary, attended

the newly opened Shelby Female Academy only three city blocks away from

Glendower.18 Before this, her formal schooling probably took place at home.19 Or she

might have attended the Lafayette Female Academy with her oldest sister Sally and her

friend Mary Todd.20 MWPreston continued at the Shelby Academy for at least four years

studying grammar, spelling, history, geography, the natural sciences, French, religion,

music, and drawing.21

42

In 1832 MWPreston was a dayboarder at Edward Barry’s “Select Institution for

Young Ladies.”22 The Barry husband and wife team was from Philadelphia, the city of

the earliest schools dedicated to American female education.23 They announced in the

Kentucky Reporter that they wished to encourage a life-long love of learning, eschewing

the traditional methods of recitation, and promised that “the inductive method will be

studiously observed, and instruction conveyed by explanations and illustrations.” They

also offered modern French and Spanish, “indispensable to a polished education,” so that

graduates “may at once become ornaments to society.”24 There she moved beyond the

typical gendered and repetition-based curriculum by studying natural sciences with such

texts as Rev. J.L. Blake’s “natural philosophy” treatises on physics and chemistry, and

ancient history with William Hales’ volumes of biblical chronology, geography, history

and prophecy. She studied mythology, French, music and English, then Spanish and

Roman history.25 In a letter to her father who was in Frankfort, she stated, “I am

studying history principally.”26 And for a man who was constantly besieged for his

captivating stories about the history of Kentucky, this would have been a positive report

of her studies. In July 1832 she attended an Astronomical lecture,27 but this was probably

not the first such extracurricular event. The women of Lexington regularly attended

lectures at Transylvania University, and social assemblies were often arenas in which

musical, philosophical and technological experts enlightened their guests.

In 1834 Mr. Barry ordered for her “1 set of Abercrombie’s Intellectual Powers &

Moral Feelings.”28 The first book in the set was a text by John Abercrombie, Inquiries

Concerning The Intellectual Powers, And The Investigation Of Truth which was

43

originally written for white male medical students “to guide them in professional

inquiries.… It was written by a man, and was intended to be read by men.”29 This topic

was not an unusual choice for a teacher in Lexington since the eminent phrenologist, Dr.

Charles Caldwell, also from Philadelphia, was at Transylvania off and on for almost

twenty years and he sat for the end of year examinations at girls’ academies in Lexington.

Most historians assume that there was a great gap between male and female curriculae,

but Southern elite schooling did not always include a gender boundary.30 Here is

evidence, at least in MWPreston’s case, that she had reached a stage in her studies where

she was far enough advanced to study metaphysics, a subject associated with the

education of white men of leisure.

The second text mentioned in the schoolmaster’s bill was Abercrombie’s ethics

book, The Philosophy Of The Moral Feelings, which continued the subject that ended the

earlier, more scientific text. The University of Kentucky Special Collections owns

MWPreston’s personal copy, but she did not made any notations or personalizing sorts of

marks. However, her father’s advice to her and her advice to her children would later

mirror the “First Truths in Moral Science:”

I. A deep impression of one’s continued existence (afterlife) whichcorrelated to a moral retribution

II. A conviction of existence and superintendence of a great moralGovernor of the universe, and that every event has adequate cause

III. A conviction of certain duties of justice, veracity, and benevolencewhich every man [sic] owes to his fellow-men [sic]

IV. An impression of moral responsibility to the moral Governor of theuniversity, and an homage distinct from that paid one mightpay to human beings31

Abercrombie stressed the necessity of studying moral feelings scientifically. He divided

44

the mental powers into two parts: the Intellectual (selfish and acquisitive) and Moral (an

awareness of one’s “important station and high duties to perform”). By clarifying this

dualism, he proposed that a “well-regulated mind” was one that did not get caught up in

the “bustle of life” or overcome by the “objects of sense” that interrupted the proper

harmony of the two parts. Ultimately, the goal for all who followed this scientific

revelation was to create “peace on earth and goodwill among men [sic].”32

This humanist Stoicism was at the core of the Wickliffe-Preston value system. As

with the ancient Romans and Renaissance Europeans, Stoic philosophy fuelled this elite

Kentucky family’s belief in being of a higher culture than most people around them.

They did not need much public acclaim via elections or news press, measures of success

that historians most often use, and instead depended on elite circles of patrons, kin and

friends to affirm this self-vision. This ideology was central to both men and women in

this nineteenth century family.

The seemingly unusual education of MWPreston was not the “wrong thing” for

her class.33 Historian Nancy Theriot synthesized research in nineteenth century female

public education and emphasized how middle class mothers would often restrict girls’

formal education to a mere extension of an apprenticeship system of the domestic world.

The schoolgirl learned the social graces in order to become members of “the cult of true

womanhood.” Theriot relied, however, on the published advertisements of girls’ schools

and the advice literature mainly from northern resources. MWPreston’s experiences did

not fit this pattern. Historian Margaret Ripley Wolfe also spoke of the genderized

curriculae of the day, and she focused on Southern women’s education by using several

45

Kentucky schools to prove exceptions to the rule of watered down academic expectations

for girls and young women. Wolfe’s examples of Varina Davis and Mary Lincoln, two

powerful women educated in the South, also contradicted Theriot’s formula of a

restricted education that emphasized the feminine “overrelated life.”34 These two

scholars presented conflicting theories about women’s education, one emphasizing the

restrictive and dependent nature of the expected student outcomes (to fit with the

ideology of “true womanhood”), and the other emphasizing the demanding academic

rigors on a par with curriculae of men’s schools which produced strong, independent

women. Either way, we see an effort to stress the “moral and political necessity of

women’s participation in the building of the nation.”35

Nevertheless, Christie Farnham in her study of Southern women’s higher

education emphasized the lack of any incentive to receive a medal, certificate or diploma

for Southern women at all.36 For most Southern whites, a few years of formal schooling

for girls and boys was plenty, since the professional and social world of elites depended

more on the efficacy of their connections than of their educational training. It is not

surprising, then, that nineteenth-century Southern elite white women’s education seems

lacking to twentieth-century educators who emphasize graduation rates as indicators of

successful schooling.

Like Davis and Lincoln, MWPreston reveled in her status as a belle both before

and after her marriage. She was well educated, “polished” in social graces, and engaged

in the political and economic world around her. After her years at private schools in

Lexington, she went to Philadelphia, probably under the influence of the Barrys, to

46

continue her education at Madame Sigoigne’s school for young ladies. The classes at

Sigoigne’s were rigorous: MWPreston willingly took remedial classes after her first

semester in order to catch up to her contemporaries’ level.37 By exposing their daughters

to Northern schooling, these elite families expected also for their children to gain a more

cosmopolitan and less parochial worldview. Equally important for the Wickliffes,

Madam Sigoigne’s school was close enough to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton that the girls

and boys could visit each other. The Wickliffe girls at Sigoigne’s did not merely learn to

play the piano, sew, and practice ballroom etiquette for superficial purposes. Their

education prepared them for more than lives as ornamental wives.38 College men

expected women in their social circle to be erudite companions, and so any potential mate

had to have attained a comprehensive education.

At these elite schools the Southern men most desirable as potential husbands

competed with each other academically and socially. For example, William Preston’s

mother confessed she was worried how her only son stood in comparison with another

elite Louisvillian, William Johnston, “who I am told is one of the best informed young

men of his age in our country.”39 They also, however, created important friendships.

Howard and Bob (Robert Jr.) Wickliffe of Lexington and William Preston of Louisville

were distantly related, but they became close friends as they traveled north to school, and

stopped in Philadelphia to see their sisters. The Southern men at school in the North

welded political and economic ties which they maintained long after they returned home,

and they expressed these ties in fraternal rituals such as dueling, hunting or moneylending

and organizations including political office and military service.

47

The elite valued intellectual accomplishments. However, the completion of a

post-secondary course of study and formal graduation was not then as important as it is

today. Many of the men who attended Northern schools moved from one school to

another, and rarely did any of these schools expect their students to complete more than

four or five different kinds of general courses. In fact, all the documentation needed for a

professional license was a letter from a respected practitioner stating how long the

applicant had studied any particular subject. For example, William Preston never

officially graduated from Harvard Law School, although his twentieth century

biographers consistently write that he did. What he brought to the Kentucky Bar was a

statement from Simon Greenleaf of Harvard University that he had studied there “from

September 15, 1836 to this day [December 19th, 1837]” and that during that period he had

been “diligent in his studies and exemplary in his conduct and demeanor.”40

A Southern white woman’s life in the antebellum Academy was an integral part

of her courtship and she was “not-so-cloistered” as the literature suggested.41 Steven M.

Stowe studied the lives of planter-class women aged fourteen to eighteen in Virginia, the

Carolinas, and Georgia, where the elite gloried in the peace and beauty of rural life and

emphasized responsibility to kin. The Kentuckian parents of the Wickliffe and Preston

families had similar expectations of their daughters in urban Philadelphia. They knew

their girls needed training not for isolation on a rural plantation but as participants in a

national, even international, urban social scene. A visitor to the South in the 1840s,

Bishop Henry B. Whipple, wrote about the differences between the education of Northern

and Southern women: “The ladies of the south… are well educated in all the minutiae of

48

a fashionable education, generally accomplished, but too frequently the home education,

as we [Northerners] term it, is neglected… The ladies of the south are well fitted

generally to shine in fashionable life, they are educated for this, they expect to here find

their sphere of action.”42

Susan Preston of Louisville wrote her brother, William, from Philadelphia in 1835

in response to the invitation he had extended to Mary Wickliffe to attend a dance at Yale

University. Her schoolmates scribbled messages all over the letter. Eagerly submissive,

Mary wrote, “William that ball ticket has put me above myself.” Another writer

complained, “I think while you was [sic] writing you mought sent us all one – Chosen

committee of Brown’s Room.” Toward the end of the letter was a dictated message from

“Cousin Peg,” that is, MWPreston. Perhaps as the younger sister and an extended

kinswoman, she felt she had a right to complain. Susan wrote, “She says that it is the

fashion in Kentucky when there are two sisters staying together to invite both--I had to

console myself and her by thinking and saying that they were waiting for the Senior ball

to write us.”43 This small glimpse in the life of boarding school shows the complexity of

behavior and rituals that Southerners brought with them to the North.

After MWPreston left Sigoigne’s school she went on an extensive holiday with

her parents and her sister, Mary. At various points in the journey she was joined by her

brothers and other kin. MWPreston’s opportunity to travel and enjoy the luxuries of a

leisured social life across the Eastern seaboard and through Virginia, including stops in

the national capital and her ancestral home “Smithfield” in what is now West Virginia,

was another important step in her elite education before she married.44

49

By removing their daughters to a distant, urban social arena, the Wickliffes and

the Prestons provided training that countered the middle-class domesticity celebrated

during the Jacksonian Age of the Common Man. MWPreston admitted that her father

had warned her that when she went to Philadelphia she should not expect to get frequent

letters from her family: “I cant [sic] say a word about not getting one line in answer as Pa

in his letter told me it was wrong to complain of not getting answers to my letters first

time.”45 The time spent at school, whether several months or years, was “a transforming

experience--one in which a girl became a lady.”46 By wrenching these girls away from

the everyday intimacies of their mothers and siblings, these families more closely

resembled the aristocratic Europeans than the household-centered bourgeoisie. In the

typical middle class Victorian scenario, the male burgher went away from the home to go

to work every morning and his wife and daughters planned the meals and supervised the

household activities while waiting for him to return in the evening. The Wickliffes and

Prestons did not conform to a pattern of male/female separation. Combined parental

involvement in the economic welfare of the family and the education of their children

typified these elite families.47 MWPreston did not identify herself solely with a close-

knit nuclear family but as a daughter in a long line and vast web of extended families.48

The household patterns of the Wickliffe-Preston families were much too

complicated and elastic over time for me to make assumptions, however one common

thread appears through the words of and about MWPreston over her lifetime: an inherited

legacy of land to serve as a locus point for her status and familial responsibility. In her

and her father’s wills were specific references to the wishes of Polly Wickliffe, and how

50

the lands she inherited from her father, Col. John Todd, should be devised. In particular,

he gave “the Mansion House and Surrounding grounds” of about 25 acres where he then

resided (Glendower) to MWPreston “as a gift from her mother Mary O. Wickliffe made

to her as a testimony of her love and affection for her while she lived.”49 He gave her

the 1600 acres of farmland she came to call Ellerslie, also he said, because his wife

desired it. He made sure to designate that MWPreston’s husband was simply the trustee,

and not the owner of these lands. “.... it is my will that said William Preston shall take an

estate by the curtesy in said lands as if the same had passed to my daughter, Margaret, by

descent and not by this devise.”50

As the namesake of the Old Duke’s first wife and the favorite step-daughter of his

second wife, MWPreston grew up knowing that her legacy of land was much more than

ownership of acreage and buildings. This legacy continuously formulated her sense of

self and her vision of her future. MWPreston knew that her step-mother, Polly Wickliffe,

did not legally own the lands she inherited from her pioneer father, Col. John Todd, but

she was able to keep them intact through her second husband--and even direct its devise

to her chosen beneficiary.51 Some contemporaries argued that she had been tricked out of

her inheritance by her husband, a greedy parvenu who conspired to this fraud even before

he married her.52

Polly Wickliffe had grown up, married and lived as a widow with a long line of

males who used her inherited lands as their own personal bank account. Her uncles, Levi

and Robert Todd, and then her cousin, Robert S. Todd, were her guardians who sold

many important pieces of Lexington and Ohio River lands. Her mother’s second

51

husband, Col. Thomas Irvine, tried to use her inheritance to pay for his own debts, and

Levi Todd was removed as her legal guardian for this purpose, according to depositions

in the Todd Heirs v. Wickliffe lawsuit. When she married James Russell in 1799, he ran

up huge gambling debts and his death three years later left her with only 2000 acres and

about 70 slaves to work them. Still she was, according to the tax rolls of 1805, one of the

wealthiest people in Kentucky.53 She needed a lawyer who could protect her landed

interests in the whirlwind of lawsuits that plagued frontier Kentucky and a farm manager

who could make sure her farms and rental property produced the cash to live on and pay

taxes each year. She had found this all wrapped up in one in the already successful

Robert Wickliffe, and her legal conveyance of her properties was clearly for love and for

power over her own inheritance.

The entry in the most recent Kentucky Encyclopedia summed up the consensus

among historians about Polly Wickliffe and the Todd Heirs v. Wickliffe case: since

Kentucky did not have in place a Married Women’s Property Act, Polly lost her property

rights once she married the Old Duke in 1826. Although vulnerable to her own

husband’s oppressive dictates regarding her estate,54 legally she had had the right to

establish a separate estate and retain control of her own property. She chose instead to

subsume her inheritance within the property of the most wealthy and most wily real estate

lawyer in Kentucky. Perhaps Wickliffe or Preston destroyed all documentary evidence of

any sense of injustice she might have felt. Perhaps Polly Russell was a stereotypical

Victorian woman--dependent, naïve in business affairs, willingly submissive to her lord

and master--and had been duped by both her husbands. Charlotte Mentelle published a

52

short tract during the course of the Todd Heirs v. Wickliffe law suit in which she cast

James Russell as a drunken lout, who showed his true nature only after Polly tore up a

contract which would have kept her estate separate from his.55 However, pro-Todd

witnesses did not make this argument in the courts. The widow Russell had twice

voluntarily given up her legal right to control her own lands.

Instead of seeing her as being twice the dupe, we might interpret this as her

having twice taken action to maintain the common law understanding of the feme covert.

And in both instances she claimed she did it for “love and affection.” Her statements

were consistent for the two decades of her second marriage, enough so that the Kentucky

Court of Appeals decided that she had not been a victim of fraud.56 Unlike the legal

relationship of child and parent or ward and guardian, the relationship of a wife to her

husband could include a legal recognition of her individual mental and physical powers

despite her status as feme covert. This ruling exposed one of the many disjunctures

between the picture of family in English-based political theory and law and the actual

lives of American families.57

The resolutions put forth at the 1848 convention at Seneca Falls were powerful

arguments for the right to the franchise, but the statement, “He has taken from her all

right in property even to the wages she earns…”58 has been particularly misleading for us

in the twentieth century. There were actually many elite women who could negotiate

various methods for control of their own property. According to Norma Basch, none of

the married women’s property acts of the nineteenth century empowered a wife “as

effectively or securely as a carefully worded antenuptial contract.”59 So, having a law

53

that allowed the newly married Mrs. Wickliffe to continue to “own” her property that she

had brought into the marriage would not have been a way to help protect her from an

oppressive husband, the numerous claims on the property from creditors and from her

Todd kin. Besides, she did not give up her right to her dower rights in Wickliffe’s

property, separate from the Todd inheritance. Indeed, Polly Wickliffe wanted to choose

her own heirs, and the Todd kin were not going to let her make that decision. She saw

the legal agency of her husband as an important channel of her own power to make a

personal decision about her inheritance.

The court documents reveal that MWPreston understood the intricacies of the

property conveyances, but more importantly knew the political ramifications of the

charges by the Todd kin against her father.60 Robert Wickliffe’s political and personal

enemies portrayed Polly Wickliffe in the press and in the courts as a gullible child-like

orphan crushed by the wily powers of a megalomaniac. Wickliffe used this image of his

wife too when he castigated Robert J. Breckinridge (a Todd relation) for making her cry.

The crisis for Polly Wickliffe was the public slander of her son, John T. Russell, who had

died without legal issue at the age of twenty-two. Breckinridge’s public charge of his

having fathered Alfred, a mulatto slave child, tarnished his honor.61 MWPreston claimed

that Breckinridge’s public humiliation of the deceased John Russell, caused the death of

her step-mother:

My mother seemed cheerful and happy until the publication in regard toher son—she was deeply affected by it, and her health declined. She toldme, that she never had a suspicion that Alfred was the son, of her son,John Todd Russell. I asked her one day Why it was that she took lessinterest in her flowers than she had done, she told me she had lost interest

54

in everything since the assault Mr. Breckinridge had made upon thereputation of her dead son.62

According to her family, Polly Wickliffe died for the shame of exposure of cross-race

and cross-class propagation. The Preston and Wickliffe families believed that the

“villany” of “foul rascals” caused her death. They were triumphant then when her

ultimate desire was upheld by the Kentucky Court of Appeals: that her tripartite

procedure which transferred all her property to the control of her husband was not only

legal but fair and without fraudulent intent on the part of the Old Duke. MWPreston

would, as her step-mother desired, inherit the John Todd lands.63 The once disputed

property, in MWPreston’s mind, served as a trophy for the social, economic and political

success which her step-mother gave her and her father had protected with his socio-

political power and legal acumen.

Though her father was a powerful role model, MWPreston’s step-mother was an

influence too. In 1882 James Mason Brown, a popular orator-historian, spoke at Blue

Licks Springs at a centennial celebration of the skirmish which marked the end of Native

American hegemony in Kentucky. For a full month before this event MWPreston

reminded him that he must also include in his eulogy a description of the noble character

of Col. John Todd’s child, Mary Owen Todd Russell Wickliffe. She reminded Brown:

“Col. Todd did not give his life more freely for future generations than his daughter

devoted hers to lift a down trodden people… My mother was an abolitionist in advance

of Garrison & Gerrit Smith & bore true stoic indifference the ridicule heaped upon her

when thinking differently from those around her.”64 Not too surprisingly, Brown left

55

Todd’s daughter out of the story of Blue Licks.65 The protocol of the Victorian era

insisted on namelessness for women.

The “15th Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People

of Colour of the United States” noted that “a lady in Kentucky offers 40” slaves. The

lady was Polly Wickliffe.66 In a private letter to her husband, Polly Wickliffe revealed

her ambivalence about the procedure involved in sending selected slaves to Liberia. She

was not sure that they wanted to go: “I have had no opportunity [sic] of converseing [sic]

with many of them I do not thing [sic] they would like to be huried [sic] into the measure

altho I think it their ultimate object.”67 Though she pledged forty freedmen to the

Colonization Society, she sent only seven on foot to Frankfort from which they travelled

to Louisville to meet the steamboat Mediterranean.68 The selection process stemmed

from her religious-based ideas to “uplift” Africa, a goal stated in a public appeal from the

managers of the American Colonization Society in 1832.69 Her feelings about

colonization come mainly from second-hand sources, most precisely in a private letter

written by MWPreston fifty years later.70 However, Charlotte Mentelle, a refugee from

the French Revolution, wrote what it meant to be a white slaveowning Kentucky woman

“abolitionist.”

That Mrs. Wickliffe was an abolitionist, was true in the best sense of theword, from benevolence and from her conception of the sense of thescriptures, but not in the sense which party spirit has given that word; whatshe wished and contemplated for the black part of the human race, was therecognition of what she thought its rights; and support by its labors in thefreedom of enjoying it. As to forwarding those ideas by fraud or violentmeans, it never entered her mind, she thought colonization and industrythe only ways to secure permanent good.71

56

Polly Wickliffe often wrote to her husband on the subject of slavery, and included

several expressions about her fear of violence and her responsibility to those around her.

Sometime between 1826 and 1828 she wrote a letter to her husband in Frankfort about

how white men were much in demand as protectors at night: “… our apprehentions [sic]

are awake & how or when they will end we know not… if I had the power all slaves

should be released, & the peace & saftey [sic] of masters secured.”72 This was abolition

as most Kentuckians thought of it, that is, “emancipationist” since this ideology rarely

included a belief in equal rights for African-Americans.

In the same sentence, Polly Wickliffe wrote a doting father what his youngest

daughter said in the midst of this rumored slave-insurrection-any-moment: “… if she

were President she would quickly have something done for the secureity [sic] of women.”

MWPreston, as early as eight or nine years of age, imitated not her step-mother’s

individualistic approach to the problem of slavery--colonization of a favored few--but her

father. She envisioned a far-reaching solution at the federal level rather than white

Lexington’s usual solution of increasing the number of “patrollers,” a militia-like duty for

white males. MWPreston, politically acclimated early in life, spoke out for formal legal

action by a government official to maintain white supremacy.

She differed dramatically from her stepmother who bemoaned “the situation of

that unhappy race of beings of whom we have so many & for whom I feel the deepest

sympathy – how great our responsibility! O that God may give us wisdom & grace to

know & discharge our duty towards them.”73 Though Polly Wickliffe spoke here in

general terms, she freed only ten individuals.74 Of those ten individuals, she sent to

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Liberia only seven, two women and their children, and they went without the male

protectors they said they wished to have with them.75 In deciding on whether to force her

servants to go to Liberia against their will, Mrs. Polly asserted her belief that “they have

there [sic] attachments as well as ourselves…”76 However, we cannot assume that Polly

Wickliffe also believed in any inherent human rights that placed African-Americans on

an equal social and political level with whites. The efforts for colonization had more to

do with a nebulous evangelicalism than it did with a belief in restitution for the crimes of

American slavery. In the letters from Liberia to the Wickliffe family in the 1850s, praises

of their former mistress intermingled with pleas for financial support.77

Many of her neighbors considered this missionary zeal on Polly Wickliffe’s part,

however limited, to be radical and abolitionist. Polly Wickliffe enrolled the young

MWPreston in the benevolent activities that the financial arrangements of her tripartite

agreements made possible.78 As one of the founders of the Orphan Asylum of Lexington,

she placed the young teenager MWPreston’s name on the Board of Managers.79

However, MWPreston did little charity work as an adult: her only effort was teaching

Sunday School to black children after the Civil War as part of her mission work for

Christ Church Episcopal,80 but this work might well have constituted an attempt at social

regulation over those she might otherwise not have much power to control.81

Late in life, MWPreston took part in the 30th Annual Convention of the Kentucky

Sunday School Union held in Lexington in 1895. For three days sessions took place in

the newly constructed Central Christian Church (out of the 447 delegates only 214 were

men), and she was a hostess to several women from out of town.82 Rev. A.L. Phillips

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D.D. of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, delivered one of the most popular talks: “Opportunity and

Necessity for Work Among our Colored People.” The Convention requested that he

speak at a mass meeting “for colored people” on the last evening held in the Asbury M.E.

Church. The International Committee sent Phillips to the New York Chautauqua offices

to present their resolutions:

Resolved, That we recognize that God has placed us in peculiarrelations to the negro race, involving the greatest responsibility for theirreligious training, from which, as His children, we dare not turn away, andhas given us rare privileges in bringing Christ to them individually.

Second – That their ignorance, poverty and docility, combinedwith our affection for them, strongly urge us to immediate action …83

They asked for money for a “colored Field Organizer” who would answer to a sub-

committee of five, of whom at least three would come “from some southern point.” As if

a continuation of the type of missionary work begun during antebellum times, it was not

unlike the Kentucky Colonization Society84 which was formed during the height of

MWPreston’s parents’ political involvement in the issues of slavery. No evidence exists

that MWPreston agreed with these resolutions, but her participation in this Convention

implies tacit agreement with the assembly. Never an abolitionist, MWPreston respected

her step-mother’s religious convictions but identified psychologically with her father, his

socio-economic viewpoints, and his political strategies.

MWPreston was trained by her father in the male culture of Southern honor as a

young girl. In 1829 the Old Duke, a Jacksonian Democrat, asked Henry Clay to defend

in court his son who had killed a Whig newspaper editor. The clever tactic succeeded:

the local jury acquitted Charles Wickliffe of the charge of murder. However, neither the

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Old Duke nor his daughters could stop Charles from dueling that editor’s successor,

Charles’ best friend, James George Trotter.85 Charles’s gun-toting behavior was, to his

father and his sisters, reckless and “imprudent”86 The Wickliffe boys preferred to be

prepared for male competitors by carrying a pistol instead of using public pamphlets and

assemblies for their exchanges.87 Their sisters, in particular, MWPreston, took these

experiences as important lessons to learn, and they watched how their father manipulated

his socio-political connections in order to avoid violence.

A good example of how MWPreston learned this lesson from her father is the

story of the duel between her other brother, Bob Wickliffe, and Cassium M. Clay in May

1841. Kentucky historians love to tell and retell this story of personal vengeance and

honor, but only Charles Roland, biographer of Albert Sidney Johnston, included the

activities of kinswomen in this socio-political story of men.88 An important letter by

MWPreston to her husband’s brother-in-law, Albert Sidney Johnston, affected the

outcome of the honorable exchange. Like her father, she used her political skills within

an elite public world, separate from the “public” courts or elections but clearly affecting

the mainstream political outcomes. MWPreston helped to craft the stage on which her

brother had chosen to duel: she brought in one of the most venerated warriors of

Southern culture. Johnston, a powerful sex symbol for both genders, took charge of the

ritual and so averted Cash Clay’s usual reliance on anti-elite fisticuffs. Thus, MWPreston

assured that her brother’s honor as he faced death would be maintained both during and

after the duel.89

Though the duel has been well documented in other histories, the inclusion of

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MWPreston makes the story worth re-telling. In the spring of 1841 Cash Clay ran against

Bob Wickliffe “The Young Duke” in a race to represent Fayette County in the state

legislature.90 In a public debate in late April, Bob Wickliffe referred to the antipathy of

Cash Clay’s own in-laws to his presumptions of abolitionism, and he implied that Clay

was simply an ignorant dupe of Northern agitators. Clay took exception to the mention

of his wife as “inadmissible” and challenged him to a duel.91 Two weeks before the duel

was to take place, MWPreston wrote to her widower brother-in-law, who was in

Kentucky visiting his relatives in Louisville: “I write my Dear Brother to implore you to

come to Lexington immediately upon the receipt of this – I have found my family in a

state of the deepest anxiety and affliction – Robert has accepted a challenge from Cassius

Clay and has left town to escape the civil authorities.” Her brother had vanished from

Lexington and gone “in the country.”92 She knew as well as her brother that if he had

stayed that he or any advocate of his, such as MWPreston’s own new husband, might

have been drawn into a fistfight. Cash Clay was renowned for his physical violence, and

she knew that any male ritual to “save face” was not just a metaphor.93 She assured

Johnston of her “unbounded confidence” in his “courage and discretion” and asked if he

would function as her brother’s “friend and adviser.” She wrote to him, she said,

“without consulting anyone” but she knew that her family would agree with her plea and

feel gratitude for his presence as her brother’s second.94

In other words, she was asking him to give her family the “gift” of his weighty

influence in a ritual of exchange between political foes. Kenneth Greenberg wrote that

Southern men of honor constantly competed against each other in games of chance, and

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that the duel was simply the most extreme form of a gamble. MWPreston knew that this

was a situation in which a man’s words were being challenged: her brother’s poker hand

was “called.” Bob would succeed in the gamble if he showed his superior marksmanship,

his manly valor and cool demeanor under fire, and his status in his choice of seconds and

a negotiator whose version of the events afterwards would be acceptable to all.95

Wickliffe and Clay met at “Locust Grove” near Louisville; Col. William R McKee was

Clay’s second, and Johston was Wickliffe’s.

According to Johnston’s statement of events, the first shot “was exchanged which

proved ineffectual.” Clay insisted then that his honor was not restored, and he still

demanded satisfaction for the insults he claimed he had received from Wickliffe during

the public debate. Another shot was demanded “which was promptly accorded.” While

the seconds were reloading the pistols, they negotiated whether or not the “point of honor

was satisfied.” During this verbal exchange, they discovered that Clay was indeed

satisfied “on the point in issue relative to the Father of Mr. Wickliffe Jr. but was not

satisfied on an [sic] another point, namely the manner in which R. Wickliffe JR had

alluded to Mr. Clay’s wife in public debate.”96 In an addendum, Wickliffe wrote a long

explanation that he had not known that a perceived insult to Mary Jane Warfield Clay

was the point of honor since Clay had “not specified any particular ground for the

challenge,” and that had Wickliffe known this, he would never have exchanged shots

with him but would have publicly apologized immediately for introducing a lady’s name

in public debate. Bob Wickliffe had assumed that the honor of his father was at stake,

and he was ready to die for the reputation of the Old Duke – just as his older brother

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Charles had done in 1829.97 The men retreated from the field, but no verbal

reconciliation between the two young men satisfactorily reestablished their honor. As

Clay wrote about it forty-five years later, “We left the ground enemies, as we came.”98

The aftermath of the duel was as important as the exchange of shots and

documents among the men present at the Field of Honor. Wickliffe assured his brother-

in-law that Clay’s friends were defeated by the clever way in which the Wickliffe-

Prestons had outwitted Clay with political negotiation in the duel. By inference, then,

Clay had lost the challenge since he had not whipped his enemy but backed out of the

duel: “even the bullies and blacklegs no longer speak of him as the ‘Little Black Bull

with hair on his back three inches long.’” Bob Wickliffe alluded to his reverence for A.

Sidney Johnston and that there was still evidence of portending violence: “The question

to be decided at the next election is one of ‘victory or death’ and I intend to be prepared

at all points.”99

In June he wrote a triumphant letter to Johnston telling him that the statement of

events had been signed by John Rowan, Jr., his other second, but more importantly to

relate to him “the best thing that has ever been said of the difficulty between Clay &

myself.” He wrote that during a large gathering, the details of the duel were being

discussed and a “lady with great naiveté” spoke out: “La! Isn’t it strange that Mr. Clay

did not think of his wife until after the first shot? I think he ought according to every rule

of gallantry to have fought first for his wife and then for himself. Now suppose Mr.

Wickliffe had shot Mr. Clay, why then Mrs. Clay’s honor would have been

unavenged!”100 Clay was thus publicly exposed, and the duel continued in the sense that

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a woman implied that Clay was a trickster, a sly manipulator, a man without honor. Bob

Wickliffe highlighted the symbolic emasculation of his enemy by emphasizing the “lady”

was speaking without artifice or political suaveness, indeed, he thought she was speaking

“naturally.” This elite woman’s public speech had unmasked Cash Clay, and clearly Bob

Wickliffe was exultant.101 Not coincidentally, Wickliffe won the election; MWPreston

masterfully orchestrated the cast of characters in the duel. The duel involved not just the

exchange of bullets, but also the verbal record that Johnston constructed. And Johnston

would not have been there without MWPreston’s letter. The public scrutiny of this

ordeal also included women’s words. The men involved in this elite ritual knew of the

importance of women in its full performance in the public realm of an exclusive and elite

world. The public activity by this well schooled elite woman was not at a mass meeting

in the streets or in a courtroom but in a realm usually associated with a “private” sphere,

that is, a kin network. The elite world in which she moved valued this sort of political

maneuvering by women, and the inclusion of MWPreston’s actions in the fuller story of

the Clay-Wickliffe duel provides a clearer view of the role of class in Kentucky politics.

Honorable behavior conveyed community membership; and conversely, the community

determined its boundaries, e.g., who were the “outsiders,” by observing and castigating

those who did not manifest the locally accepted symbols of honorable behavior.102

MWPreston constantly referred to her father as a model for her children. She

waxed eloquent about her father being “a pure good man, a patriot, the support of widows

& orphans, self denying to be able to assist in educating the young & making comfortable

the old.”103 As a member of benevolent boards ranging from Transylvania University to

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Christ Church Episcopal, the Old Duke, to his youngest daughter, was not only a paragon

of republican virtue, but also brilliant. MWPreston recounted proudly:

I made a visit on Friday to perhaps the most remarkable woman inLexington for her intellect, Miss Sydney Edmiston, seventy years of age –She pronounced the most beautiful eulogy on your Grandfather I everlistened to, She spoke of his far seeing mind, prophesying all thecalamities that have happened the South, and said she believed his greatintellect would have saved the country if he could have lived, and sherecounted so many noble acts of his life, that I wished you could haveheard her...104

His daughter spent most of her personal letters eulogizing her father, and she looked to

him, not to her mothers, for a role model for her political and economic future. But she

did not turn to him for advice on benevolence or virtue. A less ethereal tie bound father

and daughter.

Like her father, who as land speculator, politician, and member of the corporate

board of the Lexington & Ohio Railroad, MWPreston cared more for politics and

business than abolitionism or benevolent activities. As a young mother of three, strapped

for cash while her husband was serving in Mexico, she hired out selected slaves. Her

father wrote to her husband about one of these entrepreneurial ventures, “her golden

prospects,”105 and its failure. MWPreston spent six months training several women

slaves in fine sewing. Of the five women sent into Louisville homes as personal

seamstresses, two were pregnant within the year. She specifically had asked her father to

send to her those women who in their mid-twenties had not borne any children and

presumably were infertile (“a nonbreeder,” or “barren” were Wickliffe’s descriptors).

“She was sadly grieved & complained loudly against her maids until I offered to make

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whole her speculation if she would transfer me the little negroes. She replied no, a

negroe child is worth more than seventy dollars. I do not know how she will get on with

her maiden establishment unless you do as her cousin D[aniel] M[cCarty] Payne has, buy

a farm or two to breed negroes on…”106 She did not talk with her husband about her

money-making schemes, though she did admit that she was going to Louisville “for a few

days to attend to some little business.”107 Most likely she viewed her financial scheme as

her own, and much as her husband did with his own land speculations, would relate it to

her spouse once the scheme was fully operational.108

Wickliffe encouraged his children in learning the intricate management of

property early in life: he put all his children in charge of various landholdings.109

MWPreston signed her name as witness to a tenant’s lease when she was only seventeen.

The tenant, Jacob Payton, had leased a house and lot from Wickliffe before, but this time

the agreement included a new phrase. “If I get drunk during the lease I agree that the

lease shall instantly terminate, & said Wickliffe take possession forthwith.”110 This

temperance clause might have been MWPreston’s contribution to her father’s business

dealings since in all the multitudes of rental agreements Wickliffe kept no other one was

written with this restriction. Or perhaps Wickliffe was teaching his daughter how to

regulate the lower classes in her community through restrictions on their use of property.

In addition, like many other nineteenth century girls, MWPreston and her older sister,

Mary, relied on their sewing skills to serve them when they needed cash: MWPreston

announced proudly to her father that she had “made a bargain with Ma to sew for her.”111

But later in life, she reflected most often on her revered father’s abilities to gather,

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maintain and devise the properties that were her two mothers’ legacies.

MWPreston regarded slaves primarily as economic resources. She accused

William Thompson, a black manservant who functioned as a butler while they lived in

Europe, of wasting her household funds. While in their Paris apartment she questioned

his devotion to a cook she was sure was cheating her, and he finally ran away. He wrote

an explanatory letter to her husband, “I know Mrs always dislike[d] me … what ever Mrs

wished to know I told hir [sic] but she always aske[d] some one els[e] after [;] from all

ap[p]earanc[e] Mrs has no confidence in me witch [sic] I feel very much I have niver

[sic] yeat [sic] since I have bin [sic] in sirvis [sic] bin looked upon as aney [sic] thing But

a confadential [sic] sirvent [sic]…” He wrote Ambassador Preston in the hope he could

continue his work in Europe as a traveling servant, but he wished only to work under his

supervision and not hers.112

When MWPreston said that her step-mother was the “best friend” she ever had,

she probably meant that Polly Wickliffe was an important mentor and confidante.113

However, their relationship cannot be abstracted from the larger political and legal

context of patriarchy without losing its poignancy.114 MWPreston did not completely

reject the role model of Victorian motherhood nor of benevolency. She grew up knowing

how a white wealthy woman should behave: as early as age 11 she was wearing stays,

but it is likely that she wore these restrictive undergarments as early as five or six years

of age.115 The confinement of her youthful body in the prescribed form of beauty was an

early indicator of her society’s intent for her role as a Victorian woman. Intriguingly, her

school reports showed her “frequent absence from indisposition” at this key time in her

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physical and emotional development.116 Theriot linked the growing child-centeredness

of the antebellum family to a noted frequency of “feminine hysteria.” She saw girls’ ill-

health as psychosomatic and thus providing an opportunity for the daughter to reject the

cultural expectations for “feminine other-directedness.”117 MWPreston had no problem

expressing her awareness of this acceptable form of rebellion: she wrote to “Ma” as a 16-

year-old that she would “take a nervous fit for spite” if her older brother did not show up

at the appointed time to escort her home from school in Philadelphia.118 MWPreston

remembered forty years later, “Ma always inculcated upon me that the whole danger was

being alone & that no scandal could take place with three--I therefore do not like my

daughters to receive alone...”119 Polly Wickliffe taught her step-daughter to maintain her

social standing by close attention to the rules of Southern courtship, and to “value honor

as much as, if not more than, godly conscience.”120 MWPreston continued in her own

way her step-mother’s example of doting motherhood and of “uplifting” the African-

Americans who lived in her community.

While MWPreston respected her step-mother for her independence of mind about

black Kentuckians, she did not learn much from her about their inherent human rights.

Jane Giles, a former slave who had served as a nurse for the children of MWPreston,

gave her perspective on MWPreston’s treatment of her: “… because I am coulard [sic]

You sopose [sic] that I have not got any feelings I have feelings thank god as well as you

… and let me inform you that I Loved my housbond [sic] as well as you do yours …”121

Giles, unlike the African-Americans in Liberia, had enough support among the

abolitionists of New York to celebrate her freedom with a forthright letter shedding the

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mask she had donned when interacting with slaveowners in Kentucky.122

MWPreston focused her most important life-defining decisions around her “Pa.”

Eighty-five years old, Robert Wickliffe died at 8:00 a.m. on September 1st of 1859 at

Glendower.123 On that very day in Spain, Bob Woolley, MWPreston’s nephew and the

U.S. charge d’affairs in Spain, wrote about the youngest Preston girl’s nightmare of the

night before. He was in charge of the three youngest children (Sunie, Bunny, and Jessie)

in Madrid while their parents were in Paris visiting the three older children at school. As

he described the details of the household, he focused on a scenario that lasted several

hours – the hysteria of the three-and-a-half year old toddler, Jessie, who could not be

comforted because she was sure that her mother was dead. In fact, it was not until her

mother returned to Madrid that Jessie was convinced otherwise. “Tudy [her older sister,

Sunie] my ma’s dead. I want to see my ma, nobody will hear my lessons, for my ma’s

dead!”124

Her small voice resonated further than a mere recounting of the dream of a child

yearning for her absent mother. MWPreston did indeed die the day her father died. She

mourned long and deeply. For she was no longer a daughter – she was an orphan. Her

husband admitted that the “shock to Margaret was very great,” and that she told him that

“she had acted wrong in leaving her father in his old age & in coming to Europe.”

Preston did not see the logic in this self-reproach since “Mr. Wickliffe approved my

coming & did not wish me to make the race for Governor.” He admitted that the

Wickliffe girls “idolized” their father, and that he had “no hope of any other remedy for

my wife’s sorrow than that which time affords.”125

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He misjudged his wife. She continued to mourn her father for several years

thereafter, and eulogized him in her advice letters to her children. In the following

spring, while Americans began to speak openly of civil war and her husband was jostling

for the career move of his life, she wrote to him about her own life change: “... I feel so

sad that I do not feel there is anything in Paris or in Europe can give me pleasure. My

father's death was such a blow to my heart that it has deprived it of all power of

enjoyment, and I feel with me all earthly happiness is at an end. I only wish to live to

advance my children's interests [italics mine], and it seems to me that it is to their

advantage that I should return home.”126 MWPreston’s father’s estate was at the mercy

of creditors and kin, and she no longer reveled in European courts or salons. She rejected

any further extension of her important political role as the tri-lingual wife of an

ambassador. It was a role that had come easily to her--certainly it was one that seemed

natural to her for those observers who knew her from girlhood.127 She had done her job:

the Prestons left Europe with more socio-political allies than they had had before they

went. And she had gained the “polish” she desired for herself and her children.

However, her paean for her father, sung in the very middle of her years of marriage,

carried on consistently through her life. Many of her major decisions thereafter devolved

from a personal identity not unlike her step-mother’s, that of an orphan daughter

determined to save her inheritance for her own children.

Analyses of the bio-social experiences of mothers and daughters in the nineteenth

century usually explore a feminine ideology and shared experiences as female

subordinates in a patriarchal society.128 Yet, as James C. Scott has pointed out,

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“Relations of domination are, at the same time, relations of resistance.”129 The peculiar

experiences of a white daughter of wealthy parents in Kentucky, who perceived

themselves as “Southern” and “Western,” show that MWPreston was as important in

maintaining these systems of domination as she was in being constricted by them.

As the heiress of Robert Wickliffe, MWPreston recognized the role of both her

mothers as channels of property, but she also knew that only the efficient use of power

kept property in the hands of the elite. She understood that once she married, her rights

to the Wickliffe-Howard-Todd land and slaves would be subsumed within the legal entity

of her husband unless she had some sort of binding agreement. But marry she must,

since her choice of spouse was “a material investment of material consequences.”130

MWPreston, like her mothers, chose not to create a formal separate estate when she

married. Instead, she used her power lightly: she maintained close ties with her father,

and after his death she relied on her father’s trusted land agent, Jack Ewing of Bath

County, to manage the property devised to her. Unlike the Victorian middle class family,

the elite family was never isolated from larger kinship structures and a separate world of

“work.”131 In subtle ways, by retaining her role as a member of a large kin network and

her own standing within an elite society, she was able to remind her husband that he was

to function only as a trustee of her inheritance. Her more empowering sense of

daughterhood often overwhelmed her prescribed role as feme covert.

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Footnotes: Chapter Two

1 This was certainly the case in Seneca’s time, and historians of ancient Romehave made a strong case for the urgency of including the role of women in politicalhistory. See for example, Judith P. Hallett, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society:Women and the Elite Family (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984),especially ch. 1: “The Paradox of Elite Roman Women: Patriarchal Society and FemaleFormidability.” See also Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, edited by RichardHawley and Barbara Levick, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

2 This case study is representative of what was NOT middle class, yet there aresome correlations between the Victorian upper and middle classes. Historianstraditionally have explained Victorians in terms of the dualisms of private and public, ofmale and female, of white and black, of nuclear family and extended kinship. Carefullyconstructed over time, these dualisms affected how Americans viewed the world and howthey perceived each other. Such an analysis, however, has limitations, particularly inestablishing the situational context of the experiences of an elite woman. See JudyHousman, “Mothering, the Unconscious, and Feminism,” Radical America 16, no. 6(1982): p. 48. This essay was mainly a discussion on how Nancy Chodorow’s work inthe 1970s was being re-read in the conservative 1980s to emphasize a biodeterminism toconstrain women’s roles. Housman reminded us how dangerously confident we canbecome (and how ahistorical our stereotypes can be) as we study mentalitiés.

3 The “formal” family was created by legal and social mores, remaining basicallypatriarchal; but the experiential family (created by the emotional and psychologicalrelationships within a fluctuating unit) was experiencing an unprecedented tumult. SeeBryan Strong, “Toward a History of the Experiential Family: Sex and Incest in theNineteenth-Century Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): p.457.

4 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 19. This book complementsand further explicates Fox-Genovese’s theoretical base of Within the PlantationHousehold.

5 Steven Mintz, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (NewYork & London: New York University Press, 1983), p. 4. Also see John Modell, “ANote on Scholarly Caution in a Period of Revisionism and Interdisciplinarity,” pp. 41-64in Social History and Issues in Human Consciousness: Some InterdisciplinaryConnections, ed. by Andrew E. Barnes and Peter N. Stearns (New York and London:New York University Press, 1989). Modell warns historians of the methodologicalproblems inherent in the “new” social history and of the French school of studyingmentalitiés – that historians have a distinctive relationship to their evidence: “We own[sic] a responsibility for the telling of the story, and at the same time we acknowledge aresponsibility to the evidence… We proceed iteratively, fitting story to theory to story…we do not make our own evidence, but rather find it, constructed according to the

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concerns of those we seek to analyze rather than according to our own conceptualframeworks… (p. 41 & 43)” Of course we cannot escape our own conceptualframeworks, however, we can be honest in exposing them to the reader and we can tryhard not to be presentist in our interpretation of the evidence.

6 Patricia Hill Collins conceptualized a “matrix of domination” in which theinterlocking systems of domination by race, class, and gender function not as either/orcategories but as interlocking characteristics. Any one of these systems of dominationand resistance may play a dominant role in any particular experience, but Collins wrotethat we need to expand our focus of analysis of power “from merely describing thesimilarities and differences distinguishing these systems of oppression (p. 222)” with itsemphasis on quantification and categorization to a description of how they interconnect.“Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of anoppressed, group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed (p. 225).” See Collins,Black Feminist Thought, ch.11.

7 MWPreston’s gravestone at the Louisville Cave Hill Cemetery was mistakenlychiseled with the day as “25.” The Preston genealogist, John Frederick Dorman, used hergravestone as evidence of her birthdate, but the family papers place her birthday on the24th. See his genealogical tome, The Prestons of Smithfield and Greenfield in Virginia(Filson Club Publications, Second Series, No. 3, 1982), p. 242. Her husband, WilliamPreston, was born October 16, 1816, but his gravestone also mistakenly depicts the day ofhis birth as the 15th. This mistake must have been upsetting to his daughter Susan (Sunie)Christy Preston Draper who consistently wrote to her father about their joint birthdaycelebrated on the 16th. I suspect that someone else was taking care of the details (e.g.,son-in-law George Davie, probably). See Appendix A for the family lineages ofMargaret and William.

8 John Howard was not a very stable character, often leaving his family behind forlong periods as he went on adventures, even being accused of insanity at one point inVirginia (see Dorman, Prestons, p. 26). He relied on his son, Benjamin, to maintain hisfinances and secure his properties: “As I have lost my Hearing in a great Measure, I havepermited [sic] my Son Benjamin, who is my only son, to manage mine as well as his ownAffairs, commonly…” (John Howard to The Revd. Mr. Elijah Craig near Georgetown,Sept. 28, 1804, Box 15 of Wickliffe-Preston Family Papers [hereafter referred to as W-PFP]). Since the 1804 letter quoted above is a note of explanation to a complainingpurchaser of his processed hemp, he must have been already cultivated the farm at“Davie’s Fork of Elkhorn in Fayette” at least the spring before – Dorman said that he wasfrequently in Kentucky as early as the 1780s, but his family was still paying taxes inBotetourt County in 1789 (Prestons, p. 27). Also see his admission of his completereliance on his son’s business acumen in his notes on the October 1811 draft of “ThisIndented Deed of Gift” which, among other property transfers, acknowledged hisprevious deed of the 1500 acre Grove farm to his son (ibid.).

9 See Appendix B for descriptions of the family properties of particularimportance to MWPreston.

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10 Whitley, Portraiture, p. 248. His nickname might have come from his relationswith John Rowan of Bardstown, who was called “The Old Monarch.” See RandallCapps, The Rowan Story: From Federal Hill to My Old Kentucky Home (Cincinnati,Ohio: Homestead Press, Inc., 1976), p. 12. A Lexington contemporary who wrote a longdescription of his former friend, said Wickliffe “was a liberal and public spirited citizenin everything calculated to promote the best interests of Society… Mr. Wickliffe being aman of decided character, had his warm friends, and warm opponents, he had high andpositive virtues and excellencies. He was always held in high esteem and personal regardby my father and myself. I had myself the best proof of his sincere personal regard andrespect.” William A. Leavy, “A Memoir of Lexington and its Vicinity,” edited by MissNina M. Visscher, Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 40 (October 1942):pp. 358-59.

11 For a description of the places where Margaretta Wickliffe traveled, seeHistoric Springs of the Virginias: A Pictorial History (Charleston, W.Va.: PictorialHistories Pub. Co., 1981). Her letters written to her husband in 1816 (three years beforeMWPreston’s birth) from Sweet Springs, Va. explained that her “complaint is not yetremoved. I still have a pain in my breast.” See Margaret Wickliffe to “My dearHusband,” August 27, 1816, Box 39, W-PFP. Whether the pain was due to tuberculosis,cancer, or simply an unsuccessful strategy for birth control through abstinence, she stayedaway from her busy husband and from Lexington for several weeks at a time. MargaretPreston Howard Wickliffe died on February 23, 1825: see Appendix A for a list of herchildren. According to the terse obituary in the Kentucky Reporter (Feb. 28, 1825, p. 4,col. 4), she died “after a painful and distressing illness of twelve months.” Her flattombstone at the Howard Grove burial grounds in Fayette County is badly damaged byage and weather, however I was able to make out the loving words: “My Children: Thisstone covers the sacred remains of your once overly affectionate and devoted motherMARGARETTA WICKLIFFE who died in the 47th year of her life. That you mayimitate her virtue while living and have her consolation in death is the prayer of yourfather. Feb [1828]. Robt Wickliffe.”

12 For a description of Glendower see Elizabeth M. Simpson, Bluegrass Housesand Their Traditions (Lexington, Ky.: Transylvania Press, 1932), pp. 2-16. See also C.Frank Dunn, Old Houses of Lexington, Vol. 2 (Transcribed in 2 volumes, Ky. HistoricalSociety, 1930-50), pp. 529-30. Dunn stated that the house was built in 1807 since thatwas when Polly Russell was paying taxes on a house in town -- however, this finish datewas probably a mistake on his part. See Appendix B for a discussion of this issue.

13 See for example, MWPreston to her eldest daughter, Mary Owen PrestonBrown, July 15, 1882, Box 67, W-PFP. The lack of specific details on MWPreston’srelationships with her mothers is not surprising since the Wickliffe-Preston FamilyPapers were collected and maintained by the men of her family. MWPreston destroyedher own collection of letters in the 1890s. We have a glimpse of the physical closeness ofthese two women in a letter written in the 1830s by Polly Wickliffe to her husband inFrankfort. She enclosed notes from her two youngest step-daughters for him, and then

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added a postscript admitting: “You see we all write as well as sleep together are we notsaving of sheets – Is it love or money [underlining hers] think you…” MOWickliffe toRobert Wickliffe, n.d. “Lex, Sunday” [postmarked Dec. 20] [1835?]. The girls wouldhave been in their teens.

14 See for example, the post office bill from Joseph Ficklin to Robert Wickliffe,January 1, 1832, Box 28, W-PFP. See also ibid., October 10, 1839, Box 29, W-PFP.Wickliffe also subscribed to the Genesee Farmer, one of the more popular agriculturalperiodicals of the day, from New York and with a more literary format than most. SeeFrank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. 1: 1741-1850 (New Yorkand London: D. Appleton and Company, 1930), p. 442. The Franklin Farmer mighthave been the Franklin Journal which focused on engineering and mechanicalinventions, including electricity in which Wickliffe was personally interested. He paidfor an “electrician” to apply galvanistic shocks to him twice daily from March 7-10 in1857 (see bill to RW by John E. Tallow, Electrician, Box31, W-PFP; and its poor resultsin Robert Wickliffe to William Preston, March 9, 1857, Box 51, W-PFP). Otherperiodicals Wickliffe paid for were New York’s The American Monthly Magazine (aliterary extravaganza that included historical novels, and even an essay from Henry Clayon copyright issues – see Mott, Magazines, Vol. 1, pp. 618-21), the Cincinnati Mirror,the Buckeye, the Western Monthly Magazine (both also from Cincinnati), the CumberlandPresbyterian Review, the Commonwealth, the Cumberland Press, the Nashville Herald,the Richmond Whig, and a “French paper N.Y.” Most of the receipts for the Wickliffefamily’s reading materials are in Boxes 27-29, W-PFP.

15 Margaret is mentioned in particular in by Milly Crawford (Milly C to “My DearMisstress” M.O.T.R. Wickliffe, March 10, 1833, Box39 W-PFP) and by Alfred Russell(A F Russell to Robert Wickliffe, Box 50 W-PFP), two of the seven slaves who were sentto Liberia in 1833. For the full text of these letters posted on the Web (at least until2003), see <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/9539/scraps/liberia.html>.

16 Mott, Magazines, Vol. 1, p. 366. The Harbinger became an organ of AmericanFourierism when published at the transcendentalist Brook Farm.

17 Ibid., p. 206. The first general magazine west of Pittsburgh was the LexingtonMedley, or Monthly Miscellany published in 1803. The Bradford brothers set the pacewhen they bought their printing materials in Philadelphia and published the first editionof the Kentucke Gazette in Lexington on August 11, 1787.

18 Tuition bills to Robert Wickliffe for the tuition of Mary and Margaret aremostly in Boxes 27 and 28, W-PFP; for references to the opening of Ward’s school at 52North Mill Street, see Gladys V. Parrish, “The History of Female Education in Lexingtonand Fayette County” (M.A. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1932), p. 29-30; see also JeanH. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987),pp.34-47. By 1838 Ward’s school had 61 pupils, see Julius P. Bolivar MacCabe,Directory of the City of Lexington and County of Fayette, for 1838 & ’39 (Lexington:J.C. Noble, 1838), p.87.

19 The “schoolmaster” T.M. Prentiss taught 6 year old Sally and 5 year old

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Charles, the two eldest Wickliffe children. See T.M. Prentiss to Robert Wickliffe, Billfor Charles’ “First Book” and for teaching Sally from April 6 – July 4, 1812, Feb 11-April 1 & June 10-July 10, 1813, Box 27, W-PFP. This fellow might have been theThomas Prentiss who came from New England with his brother James around 1805 tostart up a manufacturing center on the western edge of town called “Manchester.” SeeJohn D. Wright, Jr., Lexington: Heart of the Bluegrass (Lexington, Ky.: Lexington-Fayette County Historic Commission, 1982), p. 24. Prentiss might have been shared byseveral other rural families in the area, rotating among the farms as described byCatherine Clinton in “Equally their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in theEarly Republic” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (April 1982), p. 44. Or, Prentiss mighthave had a school of his own – there were many private academies in early Kentucky. InLexington, there were at least three schools before 1800 which focused just on girls’education; see Parrish, “History,” pp. 1-7.

20 The Lafayette Female Academy opened in 1821 as Lexington Female Academyunder Josiah Dunham. Sally Howard Wickliffe’s poem “Reflections on LeavingHoward’s Grove” was written in 1823 and published in the School Exercises of theLaFayette Female Academy (Lexington, Ky.: T. Smith, Printer, 1826). Robert Wickliffewas on the board of visitors in 1825 at least. See a description of this school in Parrish,“History,” pp. 21-29.

21 See also the Shelby Academy classes that MWPreston’s friend, Mary Todd,attended in Baker, Lincoln, p. 37.

22 Edward Barry to Robert Wickliffe, Receipt for payment in advance of $86.12 ½for Quarter’s Board & tuition (and other items such as use of instruments, stationary,washing) ending on 29 March, Lexington, January 10th 1832, Box 39, W-PFP.

23 The first girls boarding school in Philadelphia was advertised by MaryMcAllester in 1767, but John Poor’s “Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia” opened1787 and in 1792 was the first incorporated in the United States. See James PyleWickersham, A History of Education in Pennsylvania (Lancaster, Pa.: Inquirer Pub. Co.,1886), p. 278. The Barrys were not the only preeminent schoolmasters in Lexingtonfrom Philadelphia – so was Mrs. Mary Beck when she opened her academy for youngladies in 1805 providing “an English classical education, combining the useful, theornamental, and the solid” (Lexington Reporter, April 6, 1812). See Edna TalbottWhitley, “Mary Beck and the Female Mind,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society(hereafter designated as Register) 77 (Winter 1979): pp. 15-25.

24 Kentucky Reporter, October 26, 1831.25 This curriculum is very much in line with that suggested by the popular

English education theorist, Erasmus Darwin, in A Plan for the Conduct of FemaleEducation in Boarding Schools (London, 1797).

26 This was part of a note from “Margaret Preston Wickliffe” to “Father,”included in a letter from MOWickliffe to Robert Wickliffe, “Lexington Sunday” [Dec 20is on the postmark, and the year 1835 estimated from the contents of the letter], Box 39,W-PFP.

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27 Edward Barry to Robert Wickliffe, Receipt for payment in advance of $59.56,Lexington July 31, 1832, Box 28, W-PFP. This lecture cost $1.00 – it might have beenheld at Transylvania University, since there was already a tie with that institution in thatthe Foreign Languages professor, Mr. Rovel, also taught at the Barrys’ school (seeParrish, “History,” p. 38). Or, it might have been an exhibition of Thomas HarrisBarlow’s planetarium which he had invented and constructed in 1828. See Robert Peter,“A Brief Sketch of the History of Lexington, Kentucky and of TransylvaniaUniversity…” (Lexington, Ky.: D.C. Wickliffe Printer, 1854), p. 8.

28 Edward Barry to Robert Wickliffe, Receipt for payment of $52.62 ½ inadvance, Feb. 5, 1834, Box 28, W-PFP.

29 John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, and theInvestigation of Truth, adapted by Jacob Abbott for use of schools and academies fromthe 2nd Edinburgh edition (Boston: Otis, Broaders & Co., 1843), pp. 11 and 13.MWPreston did not read this adapted edition, but probably read the original editionpublished in New York by Harper in 1832. This textbook was essentially a Romanticversion of Lockian philosophy of human understanding. Abercrombie emphasized theuse of reason in the investigation of Truth, disputing Nominalists and Realists, and stillallowing for the metaphysical distinction between “marvellous” and “miraculous” events(p. 67). This was a how-to book, essentially, since it ended with a chapter on the “RightCondition of the Moral Feelings” – which was described in full by the next volume thatBarry had ordered for MWPreston, The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings.

30 See for example Clinton, Plantation Mistress, chapter 7. The confusion aboutany overall trend in the history of Southern white women’s formal education is discussedat length in footnote #3 in Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle(New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 190-191.

31 Abercrombie, The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings (New York: J. & J.Harper, 1833), pp. 26-28. MWPreston’s personal copy is in the University of KentuckySpecial Collections and Archives, Lexington, Ky.

32 Ibid., pp. 17-22.33 Jean Baker described Mary Todd Lincoln’s extensive formal education as

having made her a “female eccentricity.” See Baker, Lincoln, p. 40. See also Smith,Inside the Great House, pp. 63-65 on the post-Revolutionary Virginian elite who he saiddiscouraged their daughters’ from learning too much. These generalizations contrasthowever with George Lucas who discouraged his sixteen year old daughter frompursuing the “ornamental arts” and instead put her in charge of his colonial plantation inSouth Carolina. See Paula A. Treckel, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: ‘Dutiful, Affection, andObedient Daughter’,” pp. 219-34 in Southern Women, edited by Caroline M. Dillman(New York: Hemisphere Pub. Corp., 1988).

34 Nancy M. Theriot, Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: theBiosocial Construction of Femininity (Lexington: University Press of Ky., 1996), p. 63;see also pp. 70-71 for her argument that mothers were the prime actors in restricting theirdaughters’ formal academic education. See Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Daughters of

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Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (Lexington, Ky.: The University of Kentucky,1995), pp. 95-99.

35 Clinton, “Equally Their Due,” p. 53; see also Anne F. Scott, “What, Then, Isthe American: This New Woman?” Journal of American History 65 (Dec. 1978). Idisagree with Clinton’s thesis that after marriage educated Southern women werecompletely restricted by “the boundaries of the domestic sphere (p. 58).” In this eliteKentucky family, women openly flaunted their educational proclivities in both domesticand public arenas, and thus broke down these “boundaries” set up in middle-classideology. On the nineteenth century educational theorists’ consensus on the genderdifference in morals and so different expectations in public schools for middle class whitegirls, see Nancy Green, “Female Education and School Competition: 1820-1850,” pp.127-141 in Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in AmericanHistory (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979); and, though set in Great Britain much of whatSara Delamont posits is applicable to American private academies for girls in the Northand the mid-West, see “The Domestic Ideology and Women’s Education,” pp. 164-187 inThe Nineteenth-Century Woman, ed. by Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London:Croom Helm Ltd., 1978). The contours of women’s experiences in the nineteenthcentury were multi-dimensional and complex, the studies cited above were restricted bythe class origins and regions of their resources.

36 Farnham, Education, p. 93.37 MWPreston, “Mag,” wrote to her step-mother, “Ma Mere,” probably in 1835

about putting off her brother’s arrival date to accompany her and her sister, Mary, hometo Kentucky for the summer break: “Mrs. Sigoigne wishes us to be prepared to enterDuvalville’s class in September We will take lessons everyday instead of three times aweek which will enable us to finish chassal’s exercises & get through the grammar thesecond time by the twentieth the time that school partly breaks up” (dated “Philadelphia,July 27th”, Box 39, W-PFP).

38 Clinton, “Equally Their Due,” p. 41-43. Clinton said that the conservativetheories of Hannah More (a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft) were rapidly adoptedin the Old South as she proposed educating women to be virtuous, criticizing “frivolous”female training in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education(Philadelphia, 1800). Indeed, many Southern agricultural journals disparaged thosewhite farmwomen and white middle-class girls who aspired to be socialites. See D.Harland Hagler, “The Ideal Woman in the Antebellum South: Lady or Farmwife?” TheJournal of Southern History XLVI, No. 3 (August 1980): pp.405-418. Baker usedSigoigne’s as an example of a finishing school for social ornaments (specifically namingMWPreston as a Lexington girl who was sent there) and quite different from the rigoroustraining at Madame Charlotte Mentelle’s where Mary Todd attended. Though the billsfor Sigoigne do not specify the curriculum nor the texts purchased, I do not leap toBaker’s conclusion. Madame Mentelle’s patron and close friend was Polly Wickliffe,and these women seem to have been of one mind in regards to the type of education thatLexington’s elite women needed. See the deed for Polly Wickliffe’s previous gift of a

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life estate in about six acres of land on Richmond Road to Waldemere Mantelle [sic] andwife. “Mrs. M.W. Wickliffe had given it to C Montel [sic] by parol and without writingmany years before (deed from Robert Wickliffe, July 5, 1839, Fayette County Deed Book16, p. 485).” See also Mrs. C. Mentelle, “A Short History of the Late Mrs. Mary O.T.Wickliffe,” (Lexington: Kentucky Statesman Print., 1850), p. 14.

39 Caroline H. Preston to William C. Preston (hereafter designated as WP),September 22, 1833, Box 43, W-PFP. Joan Cashin disagreed with Steven M. Stowe’sthesis that the Southern man’s coming of age was during his college days. She saw theirteen years in college as a mere step above the academy but still considerablyunderdeveloped compared to the “semi-dependency” of the 20s in which they were livingwith kin and learning “a central aspect of the traditional male sex role, namely that menhad duties to the family at large that were more important than their individualambitions.” See Cashin, Family Venture, p. 23.

40 Form letter headed “Harvard University,” dated December 19, 1837, and signed“Simon Greenleaf, Royall Professor of Law,” Box 43, W-PFP. In a personal letter,Greenleaf described the document as Preston’s “diploma” which he hoped would “serveas a memorial of months passed in our Institution as profitably to yourself, as theycertainly were pleasant to us whose privilege it was to direct your studies.” See S.Greenleaf to WP, November 20, 1838, ibid.

41 Steven M. Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Academy: Elite Women’s Educationand Family Feeling in the Old South,” pp. 90-106 in The Web of Southern SocialRelations: Women, Family, and Education, edited by Walter J. Fraser, Jr. et al. (Athens,Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1985).

42 Henry Benjamin Whipple, Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary, 1843-1844,Lester B. Shippee, ed. (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1937), p. 114-15. He continued his analysis of the regional differences in expectations for elite womenby mixing his references to class. He assumed that elite men of the South were allprepared for their elite status by virtue of their family connections and did not rise insociety on their own merits. His generalization about Northern elite men was verydifferent however, “most of our young men are obliged to depend entirely upon theefforts of their own (p. 114).” This stereotype of Southern nepotism ignored the very realimportance of kin and ethnic connections in the North. He then idealized Northernmiddle-class domesticity: “For a man of wealth & taste [in the south] it may be a matterof very little consequence whether his wife is acquainted with all the minutiae ofdomestic life, but such an education is of all importance to a poor young man [in thenorth] who must rise in the world solely by his own efforts (p. 115).” He backed off fromhis diatribe and seemed almost to contradict himself when he wrote: “Long shall Iremember some of my female acquaintances of the south, ladies who are unsurpassed inall those sterling attributes of character which make the female sex so lovely (ibid.).” Hewas not so much against what the Southern belle did, but that fact that she was so oftenso unlike the Northern ideal of a white middle class “true woman” as described inBarbara Welter’s “The Cult of True Womanhood.”

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43 “Sue” to “My Dear William,” Philadelphia, April 30th [1835], Box 43, W-PFP.Only her older sisters referred to MWPreston as “Peg;” before she was married shesigned her letters as “Mag,” and this was the name Sue used for her the rest of her life –even though WP and the Old Duke referred to her as “Margaret.” Few wealthy whitegirls in rural Kentucky attended the more demanding Eastern colleges (this pattern holdstrue for the Kentucky elite today). Ann Field Clay was a Clinton-esque “plantationmistress” of the beautiful “Auvergne” near Paris, and surrounded by the largestcommunity of slaves owned by one master in Kentucky, but her letters have a differentlevel of sophistication and education than that which I saw in those of MWPreston. SeeMary Clay Berry, Voices from the Century Before: The Odyssey of a Nineteenth-CenturyKentucky Family (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997).

44 See receipts for trip taken by the two Miss Wickliffes, a lady and RobertWickliffe from mid-October to the end of November 1837, Box 29, W-PFP. They wentto Flat Rock then Greenville, Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina (probably tovisit her biological mother’s cousins, General John S. Preston and Senator William C.Preston). In 1839, her future husband wrote of a presidential dinner he attended andreferred to the fact that she stood in special favor with the S.C. Senator with whosefamily she stayed in Washington D.C. (See WP to Susan Preston, December 28, 1839,Preston Family Papers, Davie Collection, Filson Club Historical Society, hereafterreferred to as FCHS.) In later years MWPreston referred to her debut in Charleston--shewould have been 18 years old. They then traveled to Richmond, Virginia, which was notfar from the Preston ancestral home in Smithfield. It would not be unlikely that she mether great-uncle, Governor John Floyd.

45 “Mag” (MWPreston) to “My Dear Ma” (M.O.T.R. Wickliffe), PhiladelphiaJuly 27th [1835], Box 39, W-PFP.

46 Farnham, Education, p. 93.47 Referring only to educational guardianships, I could prove a multitude of cross-

family responsibilities with the Wickliffe-Preston family papers. I list only a few tomake my point: Robert Wickliffe sent not only his own children to school but also thechildren of his eldest daughter, Sally Woolley. William Preston (WP) was theeducational guardian for the two children of his sister, Henrietta, who had married AlbertSidney Johnston. Johnston’s younger brothers had been raised by William Preston’suncle, George Hancock IV. Susan Preston Christy (WP’s younger sister) quarreled withher older sister, Maria Preston Pope, over the guardianship of their deceased sister’schildren--so much so that they split the family into two loyal factions which never forcedthe two sisters to reconcile.

48 See Joan E. Cashin’s “The Structure of Antebellum Planter Families: ‘The Tiesthat Bound us Was Strong’,” Journal of Southern History LVI, No. 1 (February 1990):pp. 55-70. Cashin took a fresh look at the planter families portrayed by Lawrence Stone,Edward Shorter, Orville Vernon Burton, Jane Turner Censer, and Daniel Blake Smith,and determined that they had defined the structure of family too narrowly by focusing onresidence patterns without including a sense of membership. In particular, Burton argued

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so hard for a common value system based on a patriarchal, nuclear family norm inEdgefield, S.C., that he posited that class and race were not a differentiating factor. SeeIn My Father’s House are Many Mansions (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,1985). For a good survey that answered and contradicted Burton’s thesis, see JacquelineJones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family fromSlavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Pub., 1985).

49 Will of Robert Wickliffe (privately published, after 1859, W-PFP), p. 7. Hefurther stipulated in an 1854 codicil “that in no event while I have any other propertyremaining, shall the mansion house and surrounding grounds, given to my daughterMargaret, be taken to pay my debts, nor the house in which my daughter Sally lives, andthe appurtenant lots, nor shall the Howard Grove, nor any part of it, nor the Elleslie [sic]and Scuffletown farm be taken to pay my debts (p. 12).” These were the legacyproperties of his two wives.

50 Wickliffe, Will, p. 13 and 17. See Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law ofProperty in Early America (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North CarolinaPress, 1986) on American common law assessment of feme covert powers over inheritedproperty and separate estates, especially pp. 99-101. In his 1857 codicil he devised to herthe 3,300 acres in Bath County “called the Piedmont farm” where William Prestonalready had an overseer and 22 slaves at work already.

51 Although legally a feme covert (and so no longer owning her father’s propertyexcept in fee simple), Polly Wickliffe sold her lands to her husband. She had receivedmany more properties from her father John Todd upon his death at the Battle of BlueLicks, and as his sole heir she had lived off the proceeds of these valuable holdings. Bythe time she married Wickliffe, she had sold many of the properties and many of the onesshe still owned were tied up in legal controversies dating from revolutionary era counter-claims. The conveyance of her properties to her second husband included Scuffletown,the pond tract and the Mansfield tract (including Ellerslie and the military survey of JohnFloyd), 200 acres around what became Glendower, and some Jefferson County landincluding Mann’s Lick. Since, according to common law one cannot sell property tooneself (and that being married meant she had become “one” with her husband), sheconveyed her lands to her husband via “straw man” Richard H. Chinn for $1. Thehusband and wife sold the lands to Chinn, then Chinn sold it all back to the husband only.This tripartite procedure was begun on September 12, 1827 (Fayette Co. Deed Book 3, p.86; and Book 6, p. 302), and J.C. Rodes, the county clerk, as required by law, spoke toher privately to explain what she was doing. She signed a statement that she understoodthe procedure on September 14, 1827, whereupon it was duly recorded. On February 13,1829, Rodes requested John Bradford and Oliver Keen (justices of the peace) to go out tothe home of Mary O Wickliffe since she could “not conveniently travel to the Clerk’soffice” and explain the process again to her. She insisted that the procedure was “herown voluntary act and … wished not to retract it (Fayette Co. Deed Book 5, p. 118).”The deed, commission, and certificates were produced in Open Court in March 1829, andrecorded again. The process was repeated on May 22, 1835, this time with William

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Owsley of Franklin Co. as the straw man. James C. Rodes, Co. Court Clerk, took heraside and told her two times what she was doing (Deed Book 11, p. 241) – that she wasgiving up even her dower right in the Todd legacy lands (her 1/3 share if her husbanddied before her). On May 29, 1835, Owsley conveyed the property to Wickliffe for onecent, explaining that this was being done by “Robert Wickliffe and wife with a view tothe more effectually vesting certain real estate, the property of his wife Mary O Wickliffebefore their marriage in the said Wickliffe (ibid.).”

52 This accusation was first published by Robert Wickliffe’s political enemy,Robert J. Breckinridge in “The Third Defence of Robert J. Breckinridge against theCalumnies of Robert Wickliffe…” Spirit of the XIX Century Vol. II, No. 1 (January,1843), p. 74. It is a sensational story, involving fraud and forbidden sex discussedclandestinely and openly, and so is continued without much difference in the story byhistorians in the twentieth century. See J. Winston Coleman, Jr., Slavery Times inKentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), p. 304; William H.Townsend, Lincoln and the Bluegrass (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,1955), pp. 178-90; and Baker, Lincoln, pp. 69-70. James C. Klotter described thevitriolic public controversy between Breckinridge and Wickliffe, but did not fullyunderstand the story behind the scandal they were debating: see Klotter, TheBreckinridges of Kentucky, 1760-1981 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,1986), pp. 70-73, and also p. 339, n.32 where he mistakenly identified Milly as aBreckinridge slave. Andrea Ramage summarized these events most recently, andconcluded that when the widow Russell lovingly handed over her entire estate to herhusband in the tripartite agreements, she submitted to the desires of her second husband,“the paternal patriarch.” See Ramage, “Bluegrass Patriarch: Robert Wickliffe and hisFamily in Antebellum Kentucky” (M.A. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1993), esp. pp.63-67. She explained that Wickliffe’s transitional sort of paternalistic patriarchy – thecompanionate style of his second marriage – was evidence of the demise of antebellumSouthern patriarchy. See a slightly different version in her article, “Love and Honor: TheRobert Wickliffe Family of Antebellum Kentucky,” Register 94 (Spring 1996): pp. 115-133.

53 The traditionally huge disparities in wealth in Kentucky was outlined by LeeSoltow in “Kentucky Wealth at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of EconomicHistory 43, no. 3 (Sept. 1983): pp. 617-33. This article dispelled the myth of thehandshake between the fur-capped farmer and the swallow-tailed professional man.Soltow clearly showed how the land distribution remained vastly unequal from 1800 to1860. This would support the idea that once an heiress could convince her community ofher right to her properties, then it was difficult to take it away unless you were within herkin circle. It is my belief that Mary Owen Todd Russell was at greatest risk not from themultitudes who sued her throughout her life, but from her so-called guardians (hermother’s second husband, her mother’s brother, her uncles, and her male cousins).

54 Betty B. Ellison, “Robert Wickliffe, Kentucky Encyclopedia, ed. by John E.Kleber (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992), p. 951.

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55 Mrs. C[harlotte] Mentelle, “A Short History of the Late Mrs. Mary O.T.Wickliffe” (Lexington: Kentucky Statesman Print., 1850), p. 6.

56 See “R.W. Woolley Esqr., Lexington - copy of Opinions on Jno Todd’s admrsagainst Robert Wickliffe, Court of Appeals, 6 Feby 1858,” Box 36, W-PFP. I would liketo thank Randolph Noe, attorney at law in Lousville, Ky., for his generous help intranslating the “legal-ese” of much of this court case. For the 1850 lower court opinionin which Robert S. Todd’s original complaint filed in 1849 was dismissed, see BenMonroe, "Todd's Heirs" in Reports of Cases at Common Law and in Equity decided inThe Court of Appeals of Kentucky, vol. 13 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1852), p.722.

57 Martha Minow and Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Relational Rights andResponsibilities: Revisioning the Family in Liberal Political Theory and Law,” Hypatia11, no. 1 (Winter 1996): p. 7. On the Preston side, women’s property rights wereprotected in wills also: for example, WP’s mother, widow Caroline Hancock Preston,gave to her daughter Susan land (in trust to her husband H.F. Christy) which she mustleave to “the sole & separate use of her eldest daughter, if any she leaves, if not, to hereldest son if any she leaves, it being understood that the females are to take in preferenceto the males…” (copy of Caroline H Preston’s will, probated 11 Jan 1848 and recorded inJefferson County, Ky. Will Book 4, pp. 82-83, Preston Family papers, Joyes Collection,Filson Club Historical Society). Another example is the will of Major William Preston,“... my beloved wife will here readily perceive that it is my intention she should if shepleases take the thirds of my estate agreeably to law, instead of providing a fee simpleestate to her which has been my intention heretofore by her fathers dying intestate shewill be entitled to such share of her fathers estate which with what she may thinknecessary to take of mine will be amply sufficient for a genteel support under hermanagement, I have deemed this apology proper to be made to my beloved wife to whichI will add I have the strongest and most undiminished affection for her” (copy fromJefferson Co. Ky. Will Book 2, pp.129-131, ibid.)

58 “The ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ of the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848,” inMajor Problems in American Women’s History: Documents and Essays, edited by MaryBeth Norton (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1989), p. 204.

59 Norma Basch, “Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of Marital Unity inNineteenth-Century America,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1979): p. 356.

60 In her deposition given on November 30, 1849, MWPreston stated: “My motheronce told me, that the conveyance she had made to my Father, was voluntary and she hadnever regretted it. That she had unsolicited conveyed her property to him, because shepreferred that he should have it to any one else. That he had relinquished his rights in herservants, and that she knew by marriage she was entitled to a third of his estate—that shehad requested my Father to give me all of her property at his death—and that she felt aconfidence that he would comply with her wishes.” (Court Clerk’s copy made Oct. 30,1854, Box 36, W-PFP.)

61 In his speech in the Fayette Courthouse yard during County Court Day on

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October 12, 1840, Robert J. Breckinridge accused Robert Wickliffe of being, amongother things, an advocate for the “amalgamation of the races.” In his printed copies of thespeech and in later replies, he focused on Wickliffe’s fraudulent acquisition of his secondwife’s estate, thus emancipating her slaves in exchange for a “princely fortune.” SeeBreckinridge, “The Second Defence of Robert J. Breckinridge, Against the Calumnies ofRobert Wickliffe, being a Reply to his Printed Speech of November 9, 1840” (Lexington:N.L. & J.W. Finnell, 1841), p. 21. Also, see Wickliffe’s complaint of the ungentlemanlyconduct of Breckinridge in his “A Further Reply of Robert Wickliffe to the BillingsgateAbuse of Robert Judas Breckinridge, otherwise called Robert Jefferson Breckinridge”(Lexington, Ky.: Kentucky Gazette Print., 1843), p. 55. Wickliffe closed the two yearduel via pamphlets with the final shot: Breckinridge was a Judas to his race because hehad pretended to believe (what Wickliffe could only surmise was) a slave woman’s boastof her sexual powers and so had maliciously spread “this negro slander (p. 56).”

62 From her deposition in the Todd Heirs v. Wickliffe court case begun in 1849.Her husband’s deposition was made on the same day (Nov. 30, 1849) and at the sameplace (Theobald’s Hotel in Frankfort). He said, “The impression on my mind at the time& now is, that she had been deeply wounded, and suffered much under the statementsand charges of Mr. Breenridge’s [sic] pamphlet – I personally know it was a source ofgreat sorrow to her, from the remarks which fell from her in conversation and from thedespondency which marked her demeanor.” (Court Clerk’s copy made Oct. 30, 1854,Box 36, W-PFP)

63 See R..W. Woolley’s copy of “Opinions on Jno Todd’s admrs against RobertWickliffe, Court of Appeals 6 Feby 1858,” Box 36, W-PFP. Unfortunately the officialcourt documents of this entire case (once filed at the Kentucky Libraries and Archives)are lost. The clerk’s copy in the Wickliffe-Preston papers is the only extant copy. RobertS. Todd filed his complaint on February 2, 1849, against whom the decree was handeddown on May 15, 1850 – mainly due to the fact that they had not produced John Todd’swill. His relatives appealed the decision (Todd’s & Hawkins’ Heirs v. Robert Wickliffe)in the Court of Appeals of Kentucky March 18, 1854, claiming Wickliffe had used fraudto deprive his wife of her life estate, but Kentuckians believed that women, even afterthey were married, were not like children or wards, but were thinking adults and werecapable of making rational, independent decisions. “… we think the parties concernedbeing of sound mind & of more than uncommon intelligence were the best Judges andfrom their decision in this subject their [sic] ought to be no appeal…” The Todds had notproved that Polly Wickliffe “ever thought her self defrauded.” The judges in Kentucky’shighest court expressed what was becoming an American pattern of liberal jurisprudence:a growing predilection to accommodate the rights of individuals in extended kin andfamily structures not outlined in the common law American jurists inherited fromEngland. We must keep in mind however, that (especially in Southern regions) even asthe American legal system began intervening in issues once considered of the “private”realm (e.g., human bondage, adoption, rape) – the legislatures and the courts tended tomaintain class and racial hierarchies. See Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the

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Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

64 MWPreston to John Mason Brown, July 18, 1882, Box 68, W-PFP.65 See John Mason Brown, “An Oration: Delivered on the Occasion of the

Centennial Commemoration of the Battle of the Blue Licks, nineteenth August 1882,”(Frankfort, Ky.: Kentucky Yeoman Office, 1882), pp. 27-31. In this biographical sectionon “the young commandant of the expedition,” Brown spoke briefly of Todd’s “orphanedchild; how her long life was replete to the oppressed and the poor.” Her name wasinserted in the printed version in a short footnote: “The only child of Col. John Todd wasa daughter – Mary Owen Todd – who became the second wife of the Hon. RobertWickliffe, of Lexington. She left no issue (p. 31).”

66 “15th Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People ofColour of the United States” (Washington: James C. Dunn, Georgetown, D.C., 1832), p.43. See also James Wesley Smith, Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement ofLiberia by Black Americans (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.,1987), p. 121.

67 Mary Owen Wickliffe “MOW” to Robert Wickliffe “Dear Husband,” n.d.(“Lex Satterday”) [1832], Box 39, W-PFP.

68 Readers must beware of accepting too readily the version of events as portrayedby Squire Coleman in his Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1940) or by Townsend in his revised version of his 1929 book on theTodd connection to Lincoln. Townsend’s chapter “Milly and Alfred” in Lincoln and theBluegrass is based mainly on second- or third-hand sources, and he sensationalized ratherthan analyzed this crucial time in Polly Wickliffe’s life. There were two major errors inTownsend’s version. He twisted the dates of the departure of Milly and Alfred so thatthey were “hurried” (p. 181) off to Liberia after the tripartite agreements in order toescape Wickliffe’s clutches. Secondly, he misread the Wickliffe-Breckinridge pamphletsand stated that Wickliffe “did not deny that young Russell was the father of Milly’s son”(p. 182). First of all, the two African-American women and five children left Lexingtonto meet up with the steamboat Louisville on March 10, 1833, a full six years after the firsttripartite agreement (see Milly Crawford to “My Dear Misstress,” March 10, 1833, Box39, W-PFP). And secondly, Wickliffe denied the charge that John Russell had fatheredAlfred: he wrote that Breckinridge had “told a lie on a gallant youth… [his] mullatto[sic] story and falsehood.” In fact, Wickliffe went so far as to imply that Breckinridgewas the father of Alfred by mentioning the rumors that Breckinridge was the progenitorof the children of Louisa at his farm, Braedelbane (see “A Further Reply of RobertWickliffe…,” pp. 54-56) ! Paternity suits are not without controversy today, andunfortunately Mr. Townsend’s narrative did not include any doubt who was the father ofAlfred F. Russell, the white man who went on to become the 9th president of Liberia. Fora portrait of Russell as President, see Dr. C. Abayomi Cassell, Liberia: History of theFirst African Republic (New York: Fountainhead Publishers, 1970), p. 292; andDunnigan, Black Kentuckians, pp. 377-78, and picture on p. 395. Dunnigan did not

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know of Russell’s origin other than the fact that he was born in Lexington, Kentucky.She assumed “that Russell was white, nevertheless, Kentucky proudly boasts ofproducing a President ‘regardless of race’ (p. 378).” The color of his skin was of politicalimportance both in the nineteenth century and the twentieth.

69 “And if from the thick gloom overshadowing Africa, light begins to break forth,let us look for brighter glory, and believe that he who made Joseph’s captivity theprecursor of his honour, and his usefulness, and the death of his own Son, at which natureresembled, the means of human redemption, will finally change the evils which havecursed Africa, into blessings; that the slave trade and slavery, which have been to her atorrent of wrath, laying waste all her happiness and hopes, will end in a tide, deep,tranquil and refreshing, flowing forth to wake life and gladness in all her wildernessesand solitary places, and to make even her deserts to bud and blossom as the rose.” Fromthe press release sent to editors of newspapers and other periodicals: “Address of theManagers of the American Colonization Society, to the People of the United States,Adopted at their Meeting, June 19, 1832,” (Washington: James C. Dunn, 1832), p. 8.The Kentucky State Colonization Society was formed in 1828 in the legislature, andRobert Wickliffe was selected to become its first president. See P.J. Staudenraus, TheAfrican Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press,1961), p. 137. Wickliffe quit in disgust in 1830 when Robert J. Breckinridge, proponentof the Non-Importation Bill which failed in 1828, “switched strategy and advertisedcolonization as a constitutional vehicle for ridding Kentucky of slavery (p. 144).”Wickliffe was not an emancipationist, but he had no problem with allowing free blacksremain in Kentucky (as did most Kentucky abolitionists, such as Breckinridge or CassiusClay). See his letter to William Preston after having read the 1849 Ky. constitution: “...Robert Wickliffe to WP (December 24, 1849) ...I have your constitution [;] some thingsin it are very good & some very bad, But I presume it is on the whole the best that couldbe had enacted … The clause restricting emancipation & authorising the Legislature tomake it felony of a free negroe to come into the state is inhuman. (Box 46, W-PFP).”

70 She “was as devoted to liberty as her father and spent her life educating herslaves to prepare them for civilising Africa…” MWPreston to Mary Owen Preston Brown[her eldest daughter], July 15 1882, Box 67, W-PFP.

71 Mentelle, “Short History,” p. 18.72 MOWickiffe to “Dear Husband,” n.d. [postmarked Nov 22, probably 1826-28],

Box 39, W-PFP.73 MOWickliffe to “Dear Husband,” Jan 5 [1830 or 31], Box 39, W-PFP. Anne F.

Scott spoke first about the complexity in the relationships between elite white womenslaveowners and the black people they claimed to own, leaving it that there was bothantagonism and love, but that in the end the white woman knew that slavery was an eviland at heart were abolitionists (Scott, Lady, p. 48). Many historians have countered herthesis, including Fox-Genovese who insisted that white Southern women were rarelyanti-slavery. “They complained about their lives, but their complaints rarely amounted toopposition to the system that guaranteed their privileged position as ladies (Fox-

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Genovese, Household, p. 30).”74 “I state that my husband R Wickliffe manumited and sent to Liberia of the

slaves that were mine before our marriage seven in number being Milly & her son Alfred– Lucy & her four children at my particular instance & request (& also the[i]rs). And thatwhen Willoughby after repeated bad conduct broke open stable & took of his horsesaddle & bridle I informed him he might do what he thought best with him – And that hemanumitted Lucy the mother of Michal at my request & that I desire him also to manumither son Michael.” See her formal statement signed Mary O Wickliffe, March 9, 1841,Box 39, W-PFP.

75 “… My dear Misstress how shall we thank you for all your kindness too us.We sometimes despond being all females and children haveing [sic] no male protecter[sic] of our own. but we try to put our trust in the Almighty and go on in his srength[sic]. whatever betide us. My Dear Mystress you have done your whole duty. and maythe [Almighty] bless and reward you a thousand fold ...” Milly C[rawford] to “My dearmistress” Polly Wickliffe, March 10, 1833, Box 39, W-PFP.

76 “MOW” to “Dear Husband,” n.d. [1832?], Lex Satterday [sic], Box 39, W-PFP.77 See G. W. Elroy to M.O.T.R. Wickliffe, Sept 20, 1835, Box 39, W-PFP; Alfred

F. Russell to Robert Wickliffe, July 3, 1855, Box 50, W-PFP; and Lucy Briant to RobertWickliffe, March 7, 1857, Box 8, W-PFP.

78 Her relatively long obituary noted this characteristic: “She was a woman ofsingular kindness of heart, and of the most unbounded charity, in its widest and bestsense. Her benevolence was a governing principle of her life, illustrating and adorningher whole character. It was limited by no narrow bounds, but embraced all the relationsof life and shone out in all her social intercourse.” Obituary of M.O.T. Wickliffe,Lexington Observer & Reporter, Oct. 9, 1844, p. 3, col. 7. Leavy also remembered her as“a lady of extraordinary oral excellence and worth. She was noted for her benevolence,and readiness to contribute to all calls upon her bounty (“Memoirs” Register 40 {October1942}, p. 359).”

79 MacCabe, Directory 1838, p. 23. In his memoirs of early Lexington, Leavywrote of Polly Wickliffe: “For consistent piety and active charity and benevolence shewill ever be remembered by all who knew her... Her memory is fragrant of many virtues(Register, Vol. 40, No. 131 {April 1942}, p. 120).” This is clearly a model for Southernwhite women benevolency and not to be confused with the radical “masculinity of afemale fanatic (Lexington Observer & Reporter, Nov. 20, 1844)” Delia Webster who wascaught helping a Lexington slave family escape. See the Robert Wickliffe’s petitionagainst Webster’s pardon in his papers, Box 8, W-PFP.

80 “The girls as well as Sunie Jessie & myself are teaching at the negro SundaySchool & find the little darkies brighter and more docile than white children (MWPrestonto her son “Wick”, January 19, [1868], P-JFP, I, Box 1).” She had not done this workbefore, although it was possible for her to have done so if she wished: her father was oneof the church trustees, and he rented Pew No. 2 in the original building, then purchasedfor his “heirs & assigns” the same pew in the new cathedral for $200 in 1848 (certificate

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signed by committee, 1848, Box 30, W-PFP). During the 1830s the Rev. B. B. Smith hadencouraged the Episcopal seminary to house “a flourishing Sunday school for Negrochildren that some conservative citizens in Lexington had protested that the children werebeing ‘educated’ beyond their station.” See Frances Keller Swinford and Rebecca SmithLee, The Great Elm Tree (Lexington, Ky.: Faith House Press, 1969), p. 261; ch. 14focuses on the church during the Civil War. See also William E. Dunstan III, “TheEpiscopal Church in the Confederacy,” Virginia Cavalcade 19 (1970): pp. 5-15. It isclear that the Episcopalians usually kept a firm grip on prescribed class and racialhierarchies, and its mission work was successful in areas where Anglican alternatives tothe less inhibited Protestant churches were sought. See Frances Keller Barr’s follow-upto the above text, Ripe to the Harvest (Diocese of Lexington, 1995).

81 When chastising her son for leaving a Harvard lecture hall because he saw ablack student there, she insisted that he “need not make them your equals any more than Ido because I commune with them at God’s altar who is no respecter of persons(MWPreston to Wick, March 6, [1872], P-JFP, I, Box 1).”

82 Several pre-printed cards were in her papers without further explanation ordiscussion of the Convention in any of the few remaining pieces of correspondence ofhers during this time period. The five cards read: “30th Annual Convention, KentuckySunday-School Union, Lexington, August 13-15, 1895. [the next sentence washandwritten in on the appropriate line] Guest of Mrs. Wm Preston at Mrs. Metcalfe’s, 35E. Short. This will introduce [handwritten names and home area] who is to be your guestduring the Convention. C. C Calhoun, Chairman, Entertainment Committee.” I wouldlike to thank the librarians at the Lexington Theological Seminary for their perseverancein hunting down the elusive information on this organization, and for their generousresponses to my questions.

83 “Kentucky Sunday School Union,” Vol. II, No. 1 (August 1893), p. 4; ibid.,Vol. IV, No. 2 (September 1895), pp. 1-2. The New York Chautauqua Series wasoriginally designed to support the national Sunday School movement. See Edwin WilburRice, The Sunday-School Movement, 1780-1917 and the American Sunday-SchoolUnion 1817-1917 (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1917), esp. p. 374about the organized assemblies in the summer at Chautauqua.

84 “Resolved, That, in our opinion, the successful progress of African Colonizationhas established it as the best developed scheme of benevolence to advance and elevate thecondition of the free colored population of our country in all the relations of moral, socialand political life.” from the “Annual Meeting of the Kentucky State ColonizationSociety,” (Frankfort, Ky.: Hodges, Todd & Pruett, 1846), p. 1.

85 A Kentucky Gazette notice on May 8, 1829, reported that seventy students fromRev. Ward’s school (which at that time included MWPreston and Isabella Trotter)erected a May Pole in James Trotter’s grove. We can imagine the future duelists’ sistersdancing together. Charles had by this time killed Thomas Benning, the editor of theGazette. In October Isabella’s brother, J. George Trotter, Benning’s successor, killedCharles in a duel. A few years later, MWPreston went to Madame Signoigne’s with

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Isabella. No direct evidence of their relations still exists so we cannot conjecture howthey interacted in consequence of the duel. See Baker, Lincoln, p. 39. According toWilliam Leavy, the duel was “hasty” and that George later died in the Lunatic Asylum.“It is not unlikely that his mind had become seriously affected by the tragic act (p. 389).”See also the descriptive article in Argus of Western America, October 28, 1829. Charlesprobably had little choice but to challenge his best friend to a duel: George refused toretract the insulting words of an anonymous author under the previous editor, and somaintained a publically dishonorable portrayal of Charles using trickery to win hisacquittal for murdering Benning. “Who wins the duel is symbolically irrelevant; it is thechallenge that restores honor.” See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), p. 37.Charles had to show the public that he was willing to face death for his father’s and hisown honorable reputation. However, as Greenberg saw it, the formal duel chosen by thetwo young men was only one version of dueling encounters – the values of honor did notneed only be expressed by the exchange of bullets (Honor & Slavery, p. xii). Charlescould have followed his father’s example of verbal exchanges via public oral debates orpamphlets, but he chose instead the most radical form: the duel.

86 See the letter from Robert Wickliffe Sr. to Henry Clay (March 15, 1829, ScottFamily Papers, University of Kentucky) in which he admitted that his son had behaved“imprudently” and that “never did I feel the want of you more” since he knew thecontroversy to be political chicanery: “The whole has been the work & villainy of theprince of villains Jno McCalla who confessed to be author [of the insulting article] onlyafter death of the Printer… P.S. I fear nothing but Party.”

87 For a similar incident in which guns and the speeches of powerful politiciansintermixed, see Robert M. Ireland, “Acquitted Yet Scorned: The Ward Trial and theTraditions of Antebellum Kentucky Criminal Justice,” Register 84 (Spring 1986): 107-45. Both Bob Wickliffe and Matt Ward borrowed duelling pistols from William Preston,a man who chose to negotiate out of at least one duel rather than shoot. See Matt F.Ward to WP, n.d., Box 45, W-PFP. Ireland stated that Ward had purchased the two “self-cocking” pistols from a nearby gunshop immediately before going to see William Butlerwhom he subsequently shot (p. 112); however, it is clear from the ritualistic language inthe note to WP that Ward thought of his upcoming encounter as one of an exchange ofhonor: “Dear Coln. Please send around the pistols spoken of – The one I have here isflintlock & being wholy unaccustomed to that style, I object to it.” WP was also anearnest negotiator for the duel of John T. Gray and Capt. Henry C. Pope, his twochildhood friends, on June 14, 1844. See statements and numerous letters including fromJames Speed in Box 46, W-PFP; also see Coleman, Famous Kentucky Duels (Frankfort,Ky.: Roberts Printing Co., 1953), pp. 84-93. WP was more successful in the controversybetween John C. Breckinridge and Frank B. Cutting in March 1854. See Thomas H.Benton to WP, March 29, 1854, and ibid. “Thursday evening” [the next day], Box 49, W-PFP; and Klotter, Breckinridges, pp. 107-108. For WP’s own brush with death, see thestatement: “We are happy to state that the difference which occurred between Dr. Chas.

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H. McBlair of the Navy, and Mr. William Preston of Kentucky, being susceptible ofmutual explanation, has been adjusted in a manner honorable alike to both parties (B.C.Presstman, March 10, 1837, Box 43, W-PFP).”

88 See Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1964), pp. 107-108. For mytholized versions (sans females and pro-Clay) seeRoberta Baughman Carlée, The Last Gladiator: Cassius M. Clay (Berea, Ky.: KentuckeImprints, 1979), p. 35 – she repeated the myth that there were three shots exchanged, andpresented a very poorly researched version of events; also see H. Edward Richardson,Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom (Lexington: University Press of Ky.,1976), pp. 34-35. For a recent interpretation, see Stanley Harrold, “Violence andNonviolence in Kentucky Abolitionism,” Journal of Southern History 55 (1991): pp. 15-38.

89 See Greenburg, Honor & Slavery for a wonderful monograph on the symbolicimportance of dueling in Southern culture: “The central purpose of a duel was not to kill,but to be threatened with death… Each man shot a bullet and gave his adversary a chanceto demonstrate that he did not fear death; honor was more important than life (p. 74).”Greenburg’s analysis is much more convincing than the psycho-ethnological thesis on theSouthern Scots-Irish genetic tendencies posited in Richard E. Nisbett and Dov. Cohen,Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, Col.: WestviewPress, 1996). Other important resources for understanding the rituals and rules ofplantation society from 1790-1860 are: Smith, Inside the Great House; Stowe, Intimacyand Power in the Old South; Rhys Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) -- see his last chapter entitled“Afterview”; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community inthe Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and J. William Harris, PlainFolk and Gentry in a Slave Society: white liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’sHinterlands (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).

90 See Robert Wickliffe, Jr. Election book and his draft of his “Speech to theWhig Young Men of U.S. in Baltimore, May 4-5, 1841,” in Box 40, W-PFP.

91 Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay (New York: NegroUniversities Press, 1969; orig. pub. 1886), p. 80. Clay’s published version of events werevery different from the “Statement” he signed in 1841 after the duel. In particular, headmitted in 1841 that Wickliffe did not know of his particular offense against Clay, thatis, his reference to “my wife’s name in a speech,” until after the first shot was exchanged.In his memoirs, he left the reader thinking that he fought the duel in order to protect thehonor of his wife’s name. More likely, Clay was angry at any snide reference to themarital differences widely known but rarely voiced. As in today’s political maneuvering,a man’s sexual relations provided ample images for a public unmasking.

92 Bob Wickliffe had probably gone to his Bourbon County farm, “Greenwick,” orto “Locust Grove,” near Louisville, the farm of William Preston’s uncle. WilliamPreston followed his brother-in-law out of Lexington and his notes on this duel provideplentiful detail. Preston had just begun his law practice and was well into the

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introductory steps of a successful political career. His own personal honor was thus atstake if the duel went bad. In addition, certain political groups in Kentucky had spokenout against duelling at the same time they pushed for temperance and social reform. Seefor example the letter from Dr. John Lutz who declined being present since he feared thatany involvement might look bad to his church-oriented superiors at TransylvaniaUniversity. “I have to depend on the college for a support and I am afraid that becomingconnected with that affair, it might injure me greatly.” John Lutz to William Preston,May 3, 1841, Box 44, W-PFP. WP’s law partner, W.J. Graves, was worried about losingWP altogether since he might be drawn into his own duel: “I think you ought as far asyou can keep out of the way of those who might be subject to make remarksunintentionally in your presence which you might feel called on to resent… & mightprovoke you to violence… keep aloof from crowds when such remarks might be arosed[sic].” W.J. Graves to WP, August 2, 1843, Box 44, W-PFP.

93 Elliott J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The SocialSignificance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90(1985): p. 28. MWPreston might not have been told that her brother had borrowed WP’s“small repeating pistol” in order “to be prepared & not to be bullied” during hiscandidacy for the legislature (R. Wickliffe Jr. to “Preston,” March 24, 1841, Box 40, W-PFP). She was aware that her brother’s adversary was not averse to using backwoodstactics such as knifing, eye gouging or ear biting. She would not have wanted herhusband to be left with visible scars. Gorn posited that for backwoodsmen, “scars werebadges of honor (p. 42)” since it showed they had withstood pain in their trial of ordeal.However, for Southern elites physical scarification (whip welts, missing eye or finger –or worse yet, nose) was public notice of inferior status. See Greenberg, Honor &Slavery, p. 15.

94 MWPreston to Albert Sidney Johnston, April 30 [1841], Johnston Papers,Barret Collection, Tulane University.

95 In Greenberg’s analysis of the famous duel between Henry Clay and JohnRandolph, he proved that the presence of their mutual friend, Thomas Hart Benton, wasan important ingredient in the translation of events during the duel (e.g., Randolph’s shotwhile Clay was still unarmed was deemed accidental rather than dishonorable). SeeGreenberg, Honor & Slavery, pp. 53-69. Johnston knew that this was an exchange ofgifts, because his children were under the educational and financial wings of William andMWPreston; and in the mid-1850s, MWPreston was instrumental in gaining the militarypromotion he desired. This will be discussed in a later chapter.

96 Document without heading, beginning “The following are the circumstances asthey occurred at the meeting between C.M. Clay Esq. & R. Wickliffe Jr. Esq. on the 13th

May 1841” and signed “A. Sidney Johnston,” Johnston Papers, Tulane University. In alater letter Wickliffe told Preston that both “Johnston & McKee drew up a statement ofwhat occurred on the Field of Honor.” See Robert Wickliffe Jr. to WP, May 27, 1841,Box 40, W-PFP. The duel had to be recorded and the written record agreed to by allparticipants in order for the trial by ordeal to be complete and honor restored. WP copied

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the “Memoranda of Terms &c” and kept it amongst his legal documents; the one in BobWickliffe’s handwriting was kept by Johnston.

97 Ibid. See J. Winston Coleman, Jr., The Trotter-Wickliffe Duel: An Affair ofHonor in Fayette County, Kentucky, October 9th, 1829 (Frankfort, Ky.: Roberts Print.Co., 1950).

98 Clay, Life, p. 81. Clay wrote that he thought highly of the Wickliffe-Prestonfamilies and that Bob was “a gallant fellow” – “I regret that I ever did so foolish a thing(ibid.).” He described the dilemma well however, by observing that he had put Wickliffein a “bad position” once they had left the field even though a renewed call for a fire hadbeen issued.

99 Robert Wickliffe Jr. to William Preston, May 27, 1841, Box 40, W-PFP.Wickliffe Sr. spoke of Clay as a “beast,” see for example Wickliffe to MWPreston,November 14, 1842, Box 44, W-PFP. That Clay was considered bestial (and thus oflower status) to Southern men of honor is interesting. Clearly Wickliffe would not haveaccepted Clay’s challenge to a duel but to publicly display his filial loyalty to the OldDuke. Robert Wickliffe Sr. himself never dueled using pistols, however he never backeddown from a challenge – he just made sure he had the best negotiators handle the ritualand it never came to exchange of bullets, just exchange of words. Albert D. Kirwanrecorded that it took both of Kentucky’s Great Compromisers, John J. Crittenden andHenry Clay, to halt an impending duel between Wickliffe Sr. and Robert J. Breckinridgein 1823 – see Kirwan, John J. Crittenden (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,1962), p. 43.

100 Robert Wickliffe Jr. to A. Sidney Johnston, June 4, 1841, Johnston Papers,Tulane University. The lady in question could have been Louisa Bullitt who had watchedthe unfolding of the event with great interest: “… Great apprehensions are had as to theresult [of the rumored duel between Bob and Cassius Clay], both are excellent shots andit must be fatal either to one or both parties. Mrs. Clay I hear is in total ignorance of theaffair. The Wickliffes are in great distress. Mrs. Preston and all his family [probablyreferring to the Woolleys] arrived a few days since…” See “Daughter” to Miss Susan C.Green, Bullitt Family Papers, University of Ky. Special Collections; also see WickliffeJr.’s plea to WP to help him reply to a love letter from Louisa, Oct 16, 1838, Box 43, W-PFP. Or it could have been Susan Preston (William’s sister) or Sallie Ward, both ofwhom Wickliffe greatly admired and courted.

101 In his memoirs, of course, Clay insisted that he had won in the polls, “butbeaten by unfair judges and corrupt methods.” See Clay, Life, p. 81. Cash Clay andWickliffe continued to spar politically: in the summer of 1843, Clay reacted to a speechby Wickliffe but was distracted by Sam Brown and so focused on gouging an eye andripping his ear off instead of Wickliffe’s nose (see the version of events from the eyes ofthe local attending doctor, John Darby to WP, October 8, 1877, Box 63, W-PFP). CashClay was acquitted of charges of general mayhem with a masterful argument by HenryClay that Cash could only have stood there in “self-defense” since running away was notpossible for a man of honor. Later, Cash Clay worked to stop the routine political

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appointment process of Wickliffe as chargé d’affairs to Sardinia in 1843, see themultitude of statements (e.g., from his uncle and U.S. Postmaster-General, Charles A.Wickliffe, and from wealthy political donors such as James A. Grinstead, Daniel andEphraim Sayre, and John Helm) gathered by the all the Wickliffe-Preston families tocounteract Clay’s activities in the U.S. Congress (Box 40, all of folder 2, W-PFP). Seealso the letter from Robert Wickliffe Sr. to Wickliffe Jr. where he warned that Thomas H.Benton voted against almost all of Tyler’s appointments and that Benton was friendlywith John J. Crittenden who “I am told is vindictive about your opposition to his re-election.” Robert Wickliffe, Sr. to Bob Wickliffe, May 21, 1844, Dicken-Troutman-Balke Family Papers, [hereafter designated as D-T-BFP], Special Collections andArchives, University of Ky. The Wickliffe-Preston influence was powerful enough to getBob Wickliffe the coveted appointment despite the dissension in the ranks of theCongressional delegation from Kentucky.

102 Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor theorized that the origins ofSouthernness came from the culture of honor, an ethic which preceded the antebellumslave system. Sectional differences were matters of ethical more than economic priority(p. 24),” and an ethic of honor infused all ranks of antebellum Southern society. In hisview, divisions by gender and race overwhelmed class differences in Southern culture.Wyatt-Brown relied on the work of Anne F. Scott, William Chafe, and William Faulknerto give context to his portrait of a patriarchal and patrilineal society that clearlydelineated separate domains of race and gender for these behaviors of honor. Forexample, black and white mothers were expected to function on a “little stage” fromwhich there was no exit beyond the nuclear family circle (ibid., p. 126). In describing thefather-son bonding rituals such as hunting, Wyatt-Brown pointed out the exclusion ofwhite women from the rituals of honor, not noticing that an important part of the huntwas the procession and display at the end which must include women. He relied on themisogynist Faulkner to describe in eloquent style Southern white males’ mistrust ofwomen (p. 195), and the pederast James H. Hammond to describe Southern malestrategies for honorable courtship and marriage (p. 204). He believed that nineteenthcentury advice books and sentimental novels best described female honorable behaviors:“a multitude of negatives… the exercise of restraint and abstinence (p. 227).” Therevisioning of the Wickliffe-Clay duel to include the elite women’s important roles in theactivities before and after the exchange of shots thereby elaborates a different perspectiveon a Southern mentalité.

103 MWPreston to her only son, Robert Wickliffe Preston (hereafter referred to as“Wick”), April 25 [1868], P-JFP, I, Box 1; see also ibid., Jan 2, [1869] where she toldhim that she could not consent to his request for permission to smoke since “smoking wasabhorrent to your grandfather whose pure and noble life I wish you to emulate – he said itprovoked a thirst to drink and beware of the first step to crime”; see also ibid., August28th [1871]. When MWPreston wrote that she feared her son would fall prey to “sensualpleasures” instead of keeping “high and noble aspirations,” she told him to emulate herfather (intriguingly, not his own father, her husband). She spoke of her father’s “purity

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of life, his unselfish devotion to his posterity, his patriotism, his hospitality, hiscourtliness of manner, his yearning to benefit not only his own generation but those tocome after him (ibid., August 2, 1872).” These images evoke the sort of Victorian idealthat Harriet Beecher Stowe described her father, Lyman Beecher, as at the center of “akind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen, full charged with intellectualelectricity.” Cited in Mintz, Expectations, p. 12. Another interesting father-daughterstory is recounted in the biography of Margaret Fuller; see Paula Blanchard, MargaretFuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution (New York : Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence,1978). Yet, in all this iconography, the last clause in MWPreston’s list of beatitudes –that of watching out for the socio-economic status of his descendents – was probably themost important gift from her father for MWPreston.

104 MWPreston to Wick, Nov. 1 [1868], P-JFP, I, Box 1.105 Robert Wickliffe to WP, May 10, 1848, Box 45, W-PFP. This doting father, in

a half-teasing, half-bragging way admitted to his son-in-law that “you will say that thisnegroe [sic] attachment of hers is Wickliffe…” See also William Preston Johnston to WP(his uncle), January 8, 1848, Box 45, W-PFP: “I went to Louisville with Aunt Margaret,we got back day before yesterday. She hired out her servants admirably, and fullyjustified her claim to the title, of a good manager of business.”

106 Robert Wickliffe to WP, April 17, 1848, Box 45, W-PFP. By May, sister-in-law Sue Preston Christy wrote that “your maids are coming on admirably - Louisa has afine boy I hear, in spite of all efforts to destroy it, and is ‘doing as well as could beexpected.’ Matilda is still in a state of expectancy…” (SPC to MWPreston, May 14,1848, Box 45, W-PFP). The seamstresses were not the only slaves of hers that she hiredout: she got regular reports on Tom “your french cook (ibid.),” and Sam and Charleswho were hired on steamboats on the Ohio River.

107 MWPreston to WP, May 13, 1848, Box 45, W-PFP. I do not believe that thisreticence was due to some Victorian femininity – in the same letter she denounced thepolitical reasons for the Mexican War, knowing he disagreed with her.

108 Paula Treckel showed the conscious effort by Eliza Lucas to label herexperiments with her father’s indigo plantation as “gardening.” The parallels betweenthese two women end with their legacy: Eliza saw herself simply as an anomaly – shenever provided a place for other women after her to have the same freedoms she had(Treckel, “Eliza” in Southern Women, p. 220). MWPreston was more like hercontemporary Mary Jane Warfield Clay in that she encouraged her daughters to resistgender-based restrictions to their freedom of movement. This will be discussed in thechapter, “Mother.”

109 There was no documentary evidence in the family about the eldest son’s workon his father’s farms, if indeed he did any. Charles was killed in a duel over his father’spolitical honor when he was twenty-two. B. Howard attended Yale and then went toEngland for further education where he contracted pneumonia and he died in 1838 soonafter his return to the States. The next eldest son, John, was given slaves and control ofWickliffe’s “Stockland” at Howard’s Grove (that is, Burnt Station) in 1832; then he was

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“removed” and loaned a smaller farm in Bourbon County called “Greenwick.” John’sreports to his father show that he was functioning as an overseer and agent, and that hereceived the profits from the hemp crop that the slaves produced. See Robert Wickliffe’saccount book, p. 5, Box 42, W-PFP; John Wickliffe to Robert Wickliffe, January 9, [mid1830s] and March 21 [mid 1830s], Box 39, W-PFP. John died exactly one month beforehis younger brother, B. Howard. The youngest son was Robert Wickliffe, Jr. who alsoreceived the use of “Greenwick” and the slave families who lived there. However, BobWickliffe also died at an early age and before his father had the chance to decide whetherto give his only son his full estate. Probably, the Old Duke would have still created theequal portions for his daughters to inherit whether Bob had lived or not. Sally, the eldestchild, was always associated with the Howard’s Grove farm; and the two youngerdaughters, Mary and Margaret, were always given the proceeds from the Trimble andBath County lands respectively. See Appendix A for a list of the Old Duke’s children.

110 Rental agreement between Jacob Payton and Robert Wickliffe, April 23rd

1836, Box 28, W-PFP. The small slip of paper (about 5x8”) has several crossouts on thebottom; it’s as if he were teaching her how to have it properly documented. She hadsigned in the wrong place, and he squeezed in the word “Witness” to the left so shewould sign again in the proper area. Then in the little space remaining above hercrossed-out name he hurriedly wrote Jacob “Payton,” then crossed out “Payton” and hadthe renter make his mark before re-writing the surname again for him. I felt as though Iwatched them do this business procedure together.

111 “Margaret Preston Wickliffe” to “Father,” a note enclosed in a letter fromMOWickliffe to Robert Wickliffe, n.d. “Lexington Sunday” [Dec 20 is on the postmark,and the year 1835 estimated from the contents of the letter], Box 39, W-PFP.

112 “I regret very much to inform you that I am no more with Mrs. Preston butsurcomstancis [sic] obliged me to take the corse [sic] I thought for the best… I beleave[sic] that I am the saim [sic] that I always have bin [sic]…I would go with you sir to theend of the world and would niver git tiard [sic] of sirving [sic] you and all I ask now isthat I may always have your protection & I shall niver [sic] want for Bread…” WilliamThompson to WP, June 7, 1860, Box 53, W-PFP. See also MWPreston to WP, July 6,1860, Box 54, W-PFP. In all likelihood, Preston acquiesced in Thompson’s bid forfreedom, since he received another letter from him in 1861 this time asking for arecommendation as a quadlingual servant for any of Preston’s friends travelling toEurope in the future (Thompson to Preston, June 14, 1861, Box 54, W-PFP). Thisexchange is interesting in that Thompson was legally a slave while he was in Europe –and that Preston’s main diplomatic duty while in Spain was to settle the Spanish claimsagainst the U.S. for the freeing of the African-Cuban mutineers on the Amistad. Hebrought the formal U.S. presidential statement which apologized for this 1839 court caseand recognized the legality of Spanish slavery. See Philip Gerald Auchampaugh, JamesBuchanan and his Cabinet on the Eve of Secession (Lancaster, Pa.: Privately Printed,1926); and R. Earl McClendon, “The Amistad Claims: Inconsistencies of Policy,”Political Science Quarterly 48 (1933): pp. 386-412.

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113 See for example the close mother-daughter relations in Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women inNineteenth-Century America,” Signs, I (1975): pp. 1-29.

114 Marcia Westkott, “Mothers and Daughters in the World of the Father,”Frontiers III, no. 2 (1978): p. 16. Westkott compared and contrasted two key theorists onmother and daughter relationships, Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Rich. Sheproblemmatized our interpretations of the development of female personality in apatriarchal society: “Neither acquiescence nor rebellion, neither self-denying motherhoodnor the rejection of the institution of motherhood is the whole story. It is rather in thecontradiction between them, in the dynamics between the partly unconscious ‘yes’ andthe growing consciousness of the ‘no,’ that the story of women in patriarchy – of mothersand daughters – is waiting to be told (p. 20).”

115 On the same bill for a “stay for daughter Margret, $2.50” was “One Truss forblack Charles, $3.00” – it is hard not to draw comparisons between the constriction of achild’s body and a slave’s, both for social approbation (Receipt from J. M Hewett forpayment by Robt. Wickliffe, 1831, Box 28, W-PFP).

116 Receipt for payment by Sarah Ward (for John Ward) to Robert Wickliffe, July31, 1830, Box 28, W-PFP.

117 Theriot, Mothers and Daughters, p. 111. Theriot declined to accept the easytransition from daughter to mother within a closed world of female relationships aspresented by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her famous essay, “The Female World of Loveand Ritual.” The post-Civil War daughters of these antebellum girls experienced the“green sickness” or “chlorosis” (probably anorexia) in epidemic proportions (p. 107).This is very likely why MWPreston’s daughter, Pooggie, had to be institutionalized.

118 MWPreston “Mag” to Polly Wickliffe “Ma,” July 27, [1835], Box 39, W-PFP.Charlene Marie Lewis posited in her dissertation that, unlike the fashionable weaknessesand pale visages of Northern women of the Victorian era, Southerners (both men andwomen) “saw no need for a weak woman (p. 294)” and so ate and exercised vigorously.Much of the information from the Wickliffe-Preston family papers corroborates herfindings, and will be discussed at greater length in my chapter, “Wife.” See “Ladies andGentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790-1860,” (Ph.D.dissertation, University of Virginia, 1997).

119 MWPreston to William Preston, “Louisville, Monday” [July 30, 1878], Box64, W-PFP.

120 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 129. According to Wyatt-Brown, Southernwhite women’s honor was subsumed within the males’ honor, and therefore “burdenedwith a multitude of negatives… Female honor had always been the exercise of restraintand abstinence (p. 227).”

121 Jane Giles to MWPreston, February 8, 1854, Box 49, W-PFP. This is awonderful letter full of exultation in her freedom from slave labor (“I worked for youwhen I was with you and dear madam I am working for my Sealf”) – but it also seems tobe a release from her slave marriage. She did not anticipate seeing her husband ever

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again, but the Giles name remained linked with the Preston family throughout thenineteenth century – so the problem might have been that her husband was too loyal tohis masters for her liking. Perhaps Giles just wanted out of the whole situation, andturned her back on her husband in her break for freedom. See Lebsock, Free Women ofPetersburg, on black women’s push for freedom from black male authority; and Jones,Labor of Love, on black women’s readiness to abandon familiar ways for prospects ofindividual advancement. The letter by Jane Giles is fully transcribed on the Web at<http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/9539/scraps/giles.html>.

122 See Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1972, 1974). He described the complexities of power relations inthe paternalism of slaveowners, and his chapter on “Black Work Ethic” explained howAfrican-American workers were drawn into and reshaped by the American system ofslavery. “The logic of slavery pushed the masters to try to break their slaves’ spirit and toreconstruct it as an unthinking and unfeeling extension of their own will, but the slaves’own resistance to dehumanization compelled the masters to compromise in order to getan adequate level of work out of them (p. 317).” Fox-Genovese followed with herresearch on the power relations of women within the slaveholders’ household. Herconcluding words regarding the agency of black women within slavery well described thetone of Jane Giles’ letter to her former mistress: “In the end it was will against will, andthe struggling slave woman sought, not virtue, but triumph.” Fox-Genovese, PlantationHousehold, p. 396. For more information on the experiences of African-AmericanKentuckians in nineteenth century Liberia, see Slaves no More: Letters from Liberia,1833-1869, edited by Bell I. Wiley (Lexington: University Press of Ky., 1980); Tom W.Shick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society inNineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980); and JamesWesley Smith, Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by BlackAmericans (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 1987).

123 John Preston, Jr. to WP, September 3, 1859, Box 52, W-PFP.124 Robert Wickliffe Woolley to MWPreston, September 1, 1859, Box 52, W-PFP.125 WP to his sister Susan Preston Christy, September 27, 1859, Preston Family

Papers, Davie Collection, folder 33, FCHS.126 MWPreston to WP, [May 1860], Box 53, W-PFP.127 “Mag. Preston is just what she was at school…” was a comment from Lizinka

C. Brown who visited her Paris apartment for elegant soirées (n.d. [Paris, 10 Jan 1860],Brown-Ewell Family Papers, FCHS).

128 The experiences of Southern women as daughters is not as well researched asnorthern or western women. In the 1980s disagreement arose between intellectual andsocial historians whether studying historical discourse on familial-sexual roles (especiallythose found in advice literature) was turning away from the more solid proof of materialexperiences. Theriot answered this argument in her introduction to Mothers andDaughters. She posited that the meaning structures within the historical discourses on theexpected roles can be seen as key to the moment when people “bring the happenings of

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their lives into experience, into understanding … Just as identities are produced indiscourse, experiences (as opposed to events/happenings) are produced in discourse (p.11).” Therefore, the letters produced by the Wickliffe-Preston families reveal theirconcepts of daughterhood, and the experiences of MWPreston as a daughter. KathleenCanning said that the now controversial “linguistic turn” in historical writing was bornnot simply from the seminal work of Foucault, Derrida, and/or Lacan, but also from theinterdisciplinary wombs of university women’s studies programs and journals of the late1970s and 1980s. See “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: HistoricizingDiscourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): p. 370.

129 Scott, Domination, p. 45. The resistance in this case was not always rooted ingender identity. Elite Victorian families were less concerned with primogeniture thatwere their earlier counterparts, and daughters were more and more named as equalbeneficiaries in the sharing of inheritance estates. Cashin emphasized her belief thatSouthern women typically received inheritances of personalty (including slaves) whiletheir male kin would receive property to which they had little or no access. See CashinFamily Venture, pp. 23-26. She used no statistical evidence to support thisgeneralization. Censer saw in her research of North Carolina planters that their transferalof property through the nineteenth century was generally nondirective, and egalitarian;and, she interpreted their wills as reflecting their belief in the equal rights of the childrento their inheritance, and not any particular special privilege. See Censer, North CarolinaPlanters, pp. 105-106, 115, and 117. All of the Wickliffe-Preston wills include thisegalitarian principle in their division of inheritances.

130 Lebsock, Free Women, p. 19. Lebsock insisted that despite the rhetoric ofcompanionate style marriages which were emphasized in the literature of the day, theurban women of her study were still marrying for money. In fact, she saw a statisticaltrend in the making of wills in Petersburg where propertied women were more often ableto make economic decisions “according to their own standards of propriety and justice (p.116).” Lebsock saw class designator as more restrictive for women than gender in thestatistical analysis of Petersburg wills from 1780s to the Civil War: women of the lowerclasses (whose property was of less value to their male kin than was the property of elitewomen) were 35% more likely by the 1830s to be assigned as guardian and receive feesimple inheritances (p. 28).

131 See Mintz, Expectations, p. 14. Mintz emphasized a decline in the complexityof kinship patterns in middle class American families of the nineteenth century as due tofewer remarriages and a more prolonged length of marriages and children’s lives. Heinterpreted the American industrial age as one in which the white American family lostits traditional functions: to transmit a family craft or skill, to arrange marriages, to offercare or patronage to dependent kin (p. 20). MWPreston’s kin never “lost” this function,and in fact relied on this elite networking process more at the national and internationallevels as the nineteenth century progressed.