Constance Harrison

Constance Cary Harrison also referred as Mrs. Burton Harrison, was an American playwright and novelist. She and two of her cousins were known as the "Cary Invincibles"; the three sewed the first examples of the Confederate Battle Flag.

Harrison belonged to an old Virginia family related to the Fairfaxes and Jeffersons. Her home was destroyed during the American Civil War and consequently she witnessed much of the horrors of that struggle. After its close, she accompanied her mother to Europe and while in France. Upon her return to the United States, She married Burton Harrison, a lawyer and American democratic politician, who was at one time the Secretary of President Jefferson Davis. They moved to New York in 1876, and there she began her literary life. Harrison's first magazine article was A Little Centennial Lady, which attracted much attention, and thereafter, she wrote a great deal.

Constance Fairfax Cary was born at Port Gibson, Mississippi,April 25, 1843 into a planter aristocrat family, to Archibald Cary and Monimia Fairfax. Archibald Cary was the son of Wilson Jefferson Cary and Virginia Randolph.Wilson Jefferson Cary was a descendant of the ancient and prominent English gentry family of Cary, lords of the manor of Clovelly in Devon and of Cockington and Tor Abbey, as is related in a genealogical work by Fairfax Harrison of Belvoir House, Fauquier County, Virginia  The Devon Carys, 2 vols., New York, 1920.

Monimia Fairfax was the daughter of Thomas Fairfax, 9th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, and Margaret Herbert who was the granddaughter of John Carlyle and Sarah Fairfax. Her brother was Clarence Cary, who was prominent in New York society. Archibald Cary was a subscriber to the Monticello Graveyard . They lived at Cumberland, Maryland, where he was editor of its leading newspaper, The Cumberland Civilian. When he died in 1854, her mother, Monimia, moved the family, in with her grandmother at Vaucluse Plantation in Fairfax County, Virginia, until the outbreak of the Civil War.