• Excerpt from the Preface of Lady of the High Hills:
  Natalie Delage Sumter, by Thomas Tisdale

Natalie's life flowed with the full force of the stream of history from continent to continent, in good times and bad. In her childhood we see firsthand the horrors of the French Revolution from her family's position among the highest nobility of France. Her mother was marked for death by the revolutionary mobs. Fear and loneliness accompanied Natalie as she emigrated from France to New York, where she was sent to escape the violence at home.

She grew into womanhood in the household of Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States in the first Jefferson administration and her de facto adoptive father. After her marriage to Thomas Sumter Jr. she spent eleven years as the wife of the American ambassador to the Court of Portugal in Brazil and later returned to the South Carolina backcountry as the mistress of a plantation.

She raised and educated seven children in the two Americas a nd in Europe. Natalie spent much of her adulthood on her family's South Carolina plantation. A look at her years there reveals an authentic picture of life on a South Carolina plantation in the early nineteenth century. She and her family presided over huge landholdings worked by the family's slaves. The improvement of the physical and spiritual lives of the slaves became her special concern.