Jean Louis Gibert had married Isabeau Boutiton, a fellow emigrant and sister of his assistant minister, Pierre Boutiton. She was left a widow very young, with two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, and one son, Joseph, to struggle with the difficult new life. I cannot pursue the fortunes of the colony, but without the leader and counsellor on whom they leaned the colony soon began to disintegrate and disperse, and their descendants are now scattered all over the country. But of this I am sure, wherever they have gone they have carried their strong, upright influence, always raising the standards and ideals of the communities they entered.
Little Louise Gibert very early married William Pettigrew, a blue-eyed, fair-haired young neighbor, who was charmed by her dark beauty. His grandparents had come from Ireland and settled in Pennsylvania, from which State their sons had scattered, Charles settling in North Carolina, where he was to become the first bishop of the Episcopal Church, and William settling in South Carolina as a farmer.
They had a large family, four sons and five daughters:
James Louis, who became a very distinguished man, a lawyer.
John, clever and witty, but the ne’er-do-well of the family.
Tom, who died a captain in the U. S. navy.
Adèle, married Robert Francis Withers Allston.
The sisters were all women of rare beauty, but Mary. Outsiders never could decide which was the most beautiful, but, of course, each family thought their own mother entitled to the golden apple. My mother was painted by the artist Sully when she was twenty-two, just a year after the birth of her first child, Benjamin, when she was so ill that her hair was cut, so she appears in the portrait with short brown curls, and is very lovely. There is a portrait of her painted by Flagg, in middle life. When she died in her eighty-seventh year she was still beautiful, with brown, wavy hair only sprinkled with gray.
The tradition in my mother’s father’s family was that the Pettigrews had come from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and had gone to Scotland, when they had changed the spelling of the name from Petigru, and had eventually moved to Ireland. This idea was, of course, pleasant to the little Frenchwoman, and when her eldest son, James Louis, grew up and proposed to change the spelling of his name and revert to the French spelling she was delighted, and the father consented that the children should spell the name as they preferred, but he declined to change his. So on his and his wife’s tombstone in the most interesting little God’s acre at the old home in Abbeville, his name is William Pettigrew, while all his children are recorded as Petigru. My mother said to me not long before her death that she felt it had been a mistake, as there was no survivor of the Petigru name, all the sons having died. But I do not agree with her, for my uncle, James L. Petigru, was a great man--heart, soul, and mind--and left a mark in his State, having codified her laws with knowledge and wisdom. He was almost the only man in Charleston who was opposed to secession,--I may almost say the only man in the State.[2] But he was so revered and beloved that, at a time when party feeling was intense, he walked out of his pew in St. Michael’s Church (which he never failed to occupy on Sunday) the first time the Prayer for the President of the United States was left out of the service, and no one ever said one word of criticism or disapproval. In a period when party politics ran high and bitter feeling was intense, it was a wonderful tribute to a man’s character and integrity that, even though running counter to the intense united feeling of the community, love and respect for him should have protected him from attack.