From provincial antebellum South Carolina, she escaped with the Union army to New York and ascended into high society.

Amelia's grandfather emigrated from France with his Huguenot family and fought as a lieutenant in a Philadelphia militia during the American Revolution.

Amelia's mother, Mary Carr Sees came from Northern Ireland and Amelia's maternal uncle was the renowned Philadelphian Robert Carr, who knew Benjamin Franklin, fought as a lieutenant colonel in the War of 1812, and printed multiple volumes of one of the first English language bibles in America.

[13] All agreed that the young Marie Boozer was an exceptional beauty with thick strawberry-blonde hair and deep blue eyes.

[14] The popular Southern historian Manly Wade Wellman later wrote that she was the basis for the character of Scarlett O'Hara.

Boozer was a day student at Columbia Female College in 1860, where all grades had access to French language instruction.

Boozer supported the Confederacy in the early years of the war, tending the Confederate wounded at Wayside Hospital and engaging at morale-boosting activities.

Amelia went to all those places to help the prisoners who lived in wretched conditions and Boozer, as a dutiful daughter, joined her work.

[23] While doing so, Boozer fell into a deep but chaste romance with a young prisoner, Naval Lieutenant and hero Samuel W. Preston.

An emissary to President Abraham Lincoln, Preston was handsome, well-educated, gentlemanly, and reciprocally in love with Boozer.

[31][32] By 23 March 1865 Boozer and her family had made their way to Philadelphia, where they reunited with Amelia's relatives and were celebrated by the public, press, and military as Civil War heroines.

A false story that Major General Kilpatrick and Marie Boozer romanced on the trip north from Columbia has spread to numerous "memoirs, novels, encyclopedias, and many nonfiction historical narratives.

A rebel scout saw what he thought was a beautiful young woman fitting the description of Boozer (her name was never given explicitly) at Kilpatrick's camp.

The rebel attackers spotted the woman, but they discovered the "fair damsel" was an "old, ugly ... "school-marm" from Vermont, who had availed herself of the assistance of Sherman's army to return to her home.

The story reappeared in the 1915 spurious pamphlet The Countess Pourtales, in the part by University of South Carolina history professor Yates Snowden, writing under the pseudonym "Felix Old Boy".

However, Snowden leaves out the humorous conclusion, giving the impression that it really was Boozer, rather than an older female schoolteacher, at Kilpatrick's camp.

[38] By 1956, a highly respected book on the Carolina campaign transforms the older female schoolteacher into "a lovely young woman in nightdress".

This gave Marie entrée to wealth and the higher social circles in New York, but she did not love Beecher and considered him a "pleasant old man.

[48] Marie fully expected that Phoenix would marry her but he laughed at her and said he had no intention of doing so, following a frequent pattern in his life.

All of the parties involved worked to keep it out of the newspapers, but the full account is explained in detail by Deborah C. Pollack in her book, Bad Scarlett: The Extraordinary Life of the Notorious Southern Beauty Marie Boozer.

[56] It is unclear when Marie met a French diplomat of Swiss origin named Count Arthur de Pourtalès-Gorgier, but they were together in London during October 1875.

[60] Marie put her rebelle[61] life in Paris behind her and was a faithful world-traveling diplomatic wife for the next thirty years.

[66] In admiration of his service, the French government decorated Arthur with the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, one of the highest honors in Europe.

[62] From 1894 to 1898, Arthur, Marie, and Maria were in Tokyo, where they were beloved, and where he was chargé d'affairs and secretary to Francois-Jules Harmand, the plenipotentiary French minister to Japan.

[69] The South Carolina journalist Julian Selby was an early enemy of Marie and Amelia with his specious 1878 booklet A Checkered Life.

[72] Early attacks came from the hostile reporters of the San Francisco Chronicle, under the influence of Ben Holladay, a powerful West Coast businessman.

He wanted custody of his granddaughter Maria de Pourtales and sought to portray Marie as an unfit stepmother.

Both novelists expressed regret that their hurtful portrayal of Marie and Amelia had been distorted by limited source materials.

[84][85] After traveling the world and helping Arthur with diplomatic duties, Marie lived out her last years with her husband at the twenty-five room Villa Terrarosa in Tuscany, located three miles outside Florence.