Louisa S. McCord defended women's traditional role and yet believed, and in "Slavery and Political Economy" (1856) wrote, that "the positions of women and children are in truth as essentially states of bondage as any other." She exalted slavery as a civilizing force and the protection of the slaves, and she informed a Northern visitor that "she would prefer to have $25,000 in good bank stock rather than $100,000 in negroes and plantations." She praised women as "the conservative power in the world" and praised her native state, South Carolina, for its principles "among the most conservative in all the country," and she wrote a tragedy in which the Roman heroine can conserve nothing amid the ruin killing her son. Burdened, while still in her twenties, with the care of a large household, McCord then superintended a plantation that came to be recognized as a model and reared and educated her...