Topic 3: Research Paper - So Far

This is my reasearch paper so far. Its still in early stages (unfourtunatly due to my other two reasearch papers I am also working on) I have much more to write and many things i would of written now but i was unable to form them to to comprehensive sentences at the time.  Hopefully over the next week or so things will start looking better.

Margaret Moffette Lea Houston

        At age 17 with her classmates from Pleasant Valley Academy on the docks in New Orleans, Louisiana Margaret Moffette Lea watched as the schooner Flora made its way downriver carrying the famed General Sam Houston. At this young age still enthralled by the idea of heroes Margaret watched and listened as the wounded Houston thanked the crowed for their support of Texas and was then carried away unconscious as he had collapsed form the pain of his shattered ankle. It is said that Margaret knew then that she would one day meet that man. Little did she know that at the age of 21, on May 9, 1840, she would become his wife and one of the most important influential women in his life.
        Born on April 11, 1819, Margaret Moffette Lea was the fifth of six children in a distinguished family in Marion, Alabama. Her father, Temple Lea, was a passionate Baptist lay minister and her mother, Nancy Moffette, was descendant of Huguenots whom had fled from the persecution in France to South Carolina, where Temple and Nancy would be married in 1797. Both sides of her family fought for America’s Independence. Upon her birth her oldest Brother, Martian, was 20; her older sister was 18 and gave birth to her first child that same year; her brother Henry was 16 and Vernal was 2. Her younger sister, Antoinette, would complete the Lea family in 1822, 2 months before Margaret’s third birthday.
        Settled in Perry County, Alabama, on their parent’s successful plantation, Margaret and her siblings were reared under strict religious training. Margaret could frequently be found buried in books such as those she received through mail-order; Ivanhoe, The Naval Foundling, Swallow Barn, and others. Though her mother taught her the traditions and graces of being a lady, Margaret was closest to her father, which can account for her fervent attachment to all things religious and the desire she would have to instill that in her children also. Upon her father’s death on January 28, 1834 before her fifteenth birthday, she was stricken with such grief that her family knew not how to console her. Her father had left to her four of the family’s slaves, two of which, Joshua and Eliza, would hold great importance in the Houston household during her later years.