When I began this blog, I knew nothing about Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong, my husband's great-great grandmother whose Bible sits in one of our bookcases. After locating and reading many letters she had written her sons Baker and Robert Armstrong, I know a great deal more. She was a woman with strong prejudices: she thought more of Southerners than Northerners, she thought (much) less of Texas than of Virginia, she thought her sons should marry Presbyterian girls, she hated liquor and the intemperate consequences of one's imbibing, a prejudice strengthened by the deterioration of one of her step-sons while in the grip of alcoholism. [From a letter to her son Baker, Dec. 10, 1885: "Xmas is coming. Watch & pray my dear boy that you are not led into temptation. Do not taste one drop of anything which intoxicates. It is used so much now. Oh my boy, never, never even taste."] She also was a woman of great affection who feared that her much older husband had too many worries in his old age and that his daily duties contributed to those worries, such as the difficult work of running a farm that seemed to take the family deeper and deeper into debt. Her letters to her sons reveal her love for them as well as her concern for their well-being, both "spiritually and temporally," to use one of her own phrases. Separated from her adult sons by great distance, she encouraged those young men to write her all the details about their lives, and in doing so, she nurtured in them care for others as well as an openness that one does not often encounter in letters written by young men. (I have yet to come across copies of Baker's letters to his mother--though we do have letters he later wrote to his wife, daughters, and son--but Robert's letters to his brother Baker are full of entertaining details and careful observations.)
Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong was also a woman of faith. She seems to have read the Bible through three times in the last three years of her life, for on one of the first pages of her Bible she wrote: "Began reading April 2, 1885; Began reading April 1st, 1886; Began reading April 1st, 1887." Of course, she might also have begun reading each time, without completing the exercise. But as one goes through the Bible, one will notice pencil marks around verses that seemed to have spoken especially to her:
- Genesis 18:14--"Is any thing too hard for the Lord?...." (The Lord speaking to Abraham)
- II Samuel 22:31--"As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is tried: he is a buckler to all them that trust in him."
- Proverbs 23:26-32--"My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men. Who hath wo? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder."
- Isaiah 55:6-7--"Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon."
- Zephaniah 2:15--"Wo unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness! [a bit of a pattern here--]
- Zephaniah 3:19--"The Lord is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places..."
- Matthew 11:28-29--"Come unto me, all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls."
Not only did Louisa turn to the Bible for comfort, she used her Bible as a physical repository of her sorrows and her hopes. The photo at the top of this post is of items that I found loose within the pages of Louisa's Bible. Also within those pages was a poem evidently kept to comfort her at the death of her daughter Katie. The last pages of the Bible contain handwritten records of deaths in the family, and of her son Charles' profession of faith in the Presbyterian church. Tucked into the remains of a tattered, handmade cover, is a postal from Baker, written from Baltimore, in 1881, probably on the occasion of Baker's and Robert's first venture together away from their home in Virginia.
And only a few minutes ago, as I was looking closely at the Bible again, did I realize that Louisa passed on to Baker her Bible the day she herself passed on to what she hoped to be her heavenly reward. Inscribed on an inside page, probably in Baker's hand: "For Baker W. Armstrong from His Mother, Aug 20, 1887."
Click on any of the images on this page to enlarge those images.
In a letter to Robert from his sister Janie, dated November 10, 1887: "You have no idea how helpless lonely & sad we all feel now without our dear Mother & sometimes we feel as if we just could not live without her."
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