I Do Other Things

Or, more accurately, I did other things. This is a blog interview with John Fea on "The Author's Corner" of The Way of Improvement Leads Home. 

The interview is not about Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, would you believe? Way back in the 1990s, I wrote a dissertation that was turned into a book about Louisa S. McCord. The book, published by University of Missouri Press back in 2003 under the dear and, sadly, departed Beverly Jarret, will be released in paperback in September. 

Who was Louisa S. McCord? Well, you will have to read the interview to find out! I will tell you that, except for in intellect, she was about as far away from Frederick Douglass as you could be, ideologically, and still be in the nineteenth-century United States. 

Oh, and here's a six-degrees-of-separation-type of story about Louisa McCord and Douglass.

Rev. Thomas Smyth

When Douglass first travelled in Ireland, Scotland, and England, he joined a protest by abolitionist members of the Free Church to refuse money donated by U.S. slaveholders. "Send Back the Money," they chanted. The Presbyterian minister representing the American churches who had brought over the money was the Rev. Thomas Smyth of South Carolina. He became a particular target. To shut down the abolitionist in general and Douglass in particular, he started circulating a rumor that Douglas had been seen patronizing a brothel in Manchester. Note the use of the passive voice there. Well, Douglass had been nowhere near Manchester at the time (I checked, too) and therefore slapped Smyth with a libel suit. Smyth backed down immediately. He had only heard, you understand, not actually witnessed, and the whole story was third-hand. 

Well, Smyth had a son, Augustus, who went on to add an -e to the last name. Augustus grew up, joined one of the South Carolina regiments during the Civil War, courted, and then married Louisa Rebecca Hayne McCord. That Louisa McCord's mother was Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord, subject of Southern Womanhood and Slavery. 

So: short, written to be accessible for freshmen, available used, as an e-book, and now in paperback. If you are teaching one of those large U.S. history surveys, remember that Auntie Leigh needs a new pair of boots!

ETA: University of Missouri will actually have a stock in their warehouse, ready to ship, on August 1st, just in case you want to assign for your fall classes!