A Lady of the High Hills

A Lady of the Hills: Natalie Delage Sumter. By Thomas Tisdale. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xvii, 188. Illustrations. Cloth, $29.95.)In no way can Natalie Delage Sumter's life be called representative by the standards of early nineteenth-century America. It certainly was interesting, however. The goddaughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Marie Louise Stephanie Beatrix Nathalie de Lage de Volude was born at Versailles in 1782. As high-ranking members of the French nobility and staunch reactionaries, her parents were early targets of the revolutionary movement. In 1793 they sent eleven-year-old Natalie with her governess to New York for her protection. The rest of her family scattered across Europe, awaiting the defeat of Revolutionary forces so that they might return to France and reoccupy the privileged positions to which they believed they were entitled. They situated themselves within the city's burgeoning French emigre community. When Aaron Burr hired Natalie's governess to run his household and raise his daughter, Theodosia, according to the French manner, Natalie became a member of his household. Burr raised Natalie as his daughter until 1801, when, at the age of nineteen, she sailed back to France, encouraged by Napoleon's policy of reconciliation with the old aristocracy.On the crossing Natalie met and fell in love with Thomas Sumter Jr., a planter's son from South Carolina. Sumter was to serve as secretary to the American legation in Paris under Robert R. Livingston, a reward for his father's staunch Jeffersonianism. Chancellor Livingston proved instrumental in convincing Natalie's skeptical mother to accept the match. Readers will be left wondering why Livingston took such pains to aid Sumter, since Tisdale makes it clear that the two shared a mutual enmity. Nevertheless, Sumter overcame the marquise's objections, and he and Natalie married in March 1802. Sumter left the Paris embassy to serve in London, and after seven months there, during which Natalie gave birth to a daughter, they returned to his father's plantation in the High Hills of South Carolina in what is now Sumter County, between the lowcountry and the fall line. Though Tisdale suggests that Natalie adjusted to what he characterizes dubiously as a wonderfully cosmopolitan rural community (65) rather easily, the evidence suggests otherwise. Her husband's financial affairs were in disarray, she pined for France, and Natalie gave birth to two more girls in 1805 and 1806

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