Nell Arthur - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that August 30 is the anniversary of the birth of the wife of the 21st President of the United States, Chester A. Arthur.

Rest in peace Ellen Lewis "Nell" Herndon Arthur,

Image: A posthumous portrait of Ellen Arthur, painted from a photograph.

Background from firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=22
"First Lady Biography: Ellen Arthur
ELLEN LEWIS HERNDON ARTHUR

Birth 30 August 30 1837
Culpepper CourtHouse,Virginia
Ellen Lewis Herndon was born in a house built by her father’s brother, Brodie Strachan Herndon. The structure remains standing, now known as “the Johnson house.”
Father William Lewis Herndon, born 25 October 1814,Fredericksburg,Virginia; naval officer; died 12 September 1857, Atlantic Ocean, off Cape Hatteras,North Carolina in a shipwreck.
Son of a banker, Herndon joined the United States Navy as a teenager, and was made an acting midshipman in 1819. He served on active duty during the Seminole War (1841-1842) and the Mexican War (1847-1848), eventually rising to the rank of Commander in 1855. His most famous assignment, however, was an exploration of the Amazon River(1851-1852). He began the adventure at an altitude rise of 16,699 feet in the Andes Mountains in Peru, eventually following streams into the large river for over four thousand miles, and by foot through the remote jungles. It took a total of 327 days. In the following two years (1852 -1854), he lived inWashington while writing and assembling material for the congressional publication Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon.
From this assignment, he took command of the merchant steamship George Law (later renamed theCentral America),beginning in October of 1855. Two years later, while taking the ship from Havana,Cuba to New York, the ship wrecked off the North Carolina coast. After first seeing the full evacuation of passengers in lifeboats led by some of his crew, he and his remaining crew went down with his ship. Dying a hero, his chivalry earned him a posthumous national fame.

Mother Frances Elizabeth “Kit” Hansbrough Herndon, born 10 October 1817, Culpeper, Virginia; married 9 November 1836, Culpeper, Virginia at St. Mark's Parish; died
5 April 1878, Hyeres, France

Siblings Only child; Ellen Arthur was the third of seven presidential wives who were only children. The one who was an only child who preceded her was Eliza Johnson; those who followed her were Frances Cleveland, Grace Coolidge, Nancy Reagan (who had a stepbrother), and Laura Bush.

Ancestry English, Dutch, French; Ellen Arthur’s maternal ancestor who immigrated to the Virginia colony in 1639 from England was John Hanbury (born about 1615). His mother, Adrian Cash was Dutch. Two of her paternal ancestors who immigrated to the Virginia colony, were Meindert Doodes and Mary Geret (both born about 1610), also came from Holland. There is also indication that she was related to early French Hugenots who settled in Virginia.

Religion Episcopalian

Appearance Medium height, brown hair, brown eyes

Education Unknown; school in Washington,D.C.

Life Before Marriage Few specifics are documented about Ellen Arthur’s earliest years. Described by a contemporary as “one of the best specimens of the Southern woman,” would suggest that she assumed the traditional responsibilities of wealthy southern elite women of her era: the domestic arts, lavish, frequent and generous entertaining, directing the education, religious training and appearance of her children, and commitment to her church parish.

Four months before her birth, Ellen Herndon’s father, then a lieutenant in the United States Navy, was assigned to sea duty and thus absent when she was born. This fact, along with her being an only child, may account for her extremely close relationship with her mother. The family ties between her father to his siblings, their spouses and children were especially tight. Although she was an only child, Ellen Herndon was particularly close to her first “double” cousins, whose parents were the sister of her mother and brother of her father.

In September 1842, Ellen Herndon and her parents moved toWashington,D.C., due to her father’s appointment to the U.S. Navy Department’s Depot of Instruments and Charts, located at the present-day U. S. Naval Observatory. William Herndon’s job opportunity was a result of nepotism, since his superior, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury (soon-to-be-famous as “Pathfinder of the Seas"), was not only a cousin, but his brother-in-law, married to his sister Ann. His responsibility included assisting Maury to write and publish Sailing Directions, a global navigation guide.


Ellen Arthur’s predominant talent was a beautiful singing voice that was cultivated at a very early age. Her uncle had recorded that singing was also an outstanding gift of her mother, and considering the especial closeness between the two women, it was likely the daughter was emulating her mother. A primary activity of her life in Washington as a young girl was her membership in the youth choir of St. John’sChurch on Lafayette Square, across from the White House.

According to family lore, as a child she became a “close personal friend” of Dolley Madison and visited her “quite frequently.” There was something more to the acquaintance between the young Ellen Herndon and former First Lady Dolley Madison beyond the fact that they shared the same church parish. The window of time they could have known each other, however, ranged from 1842 to 1847, when Ellen Herndon was in an age range from five to ten years old, and Dolley Madison, was in an age range from seventy-four to seventy-nine years old.

In September of 1847, while her father was on active duty during the Mexican War, Ellen Herndon and her mother left Washington, to live in Fredericksburg, Virginiain a house still standing, at Lewis and Prince Edward Streets. However, in 1851, when he was exploring the Amazon River, Ellen Herndon returned to live in the nation’s capital with her mother until 1855. Their return was likely prompted by the now-permanent residency there of Ellen Herndon’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Sumner Hansbrough, who lived there until his death there at age 74 years old, in 1864. He was buried in the famous Congressional Cemetery there.

Maturing into her teenage years during her second residency in Washington,D.C., Ellen was able to take full advantage of the social life in which young women of the elite class were encouraged to fully participate. With the great wealth of her mother and the prestige of her father’s military status, she was exposed to the most powerful figures of national politics, society, and the military, who were often entertained by her mother, paternal uncle and paternal aunt. Her father’s command of a merchant steamship based at the port of New York, had them relocated to that city by 1857, moving into a brownstone they bought at 34 West 21stStreet.

Upon William Herndon’s 1857 death on the Central America there was bestowed a host of honors on his wife and daughter. There was a “handsome” public subscription to raise funds for them. An impressive monument was built to him at Annapolis Naval Academy. The Commonwealth of Virginia ordered that a unique gold medal be struck to memorialize Herndon, and it was presented to his widow and daughter. Commodore Maury wrote an official report of Herndon’s heroic last voyage for the Secretary of the Navy. Congress and several State legislatures made official resolutions in his honor. Even the wealthy Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had owned the Central America, tried to offer a distraction by having Mrs. Herndon drive his newly-purchased team of well-bred horses.

Despite the loss of her father, the reality was that most of her life had been spent alone in her mother’s company, William Herndon being a largely absent father. In addition, once a mourning period suitable to the social customs of the upper-class had been observed, Ellen Herndon resumed an active social life with her mother, who was described as having a “cheerful and hopeful disposition.” Throughout the summer months, they moved between the upper-class resorts of Newport, Rhode Island and Saratoga Springs,New York, to socialize with others in their elite circle.

The year after her father’s death, Ellen Herndon was vacationing with her mother in Saratoga, when her cousin Dabney Herndon, then a medical student, introduced her to Chester Alan Arthur, a lawyer, with whom he shared rented rooms in New York. It was Ellen Herndon’s beautiful singing which first captured Arthur’s attention. A year later, in 1858, again at Saratoga, on the front porch of the United States Hotel, he proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. Shortly thereafter, he reminisced to “Nell,” as he always called her, about “the soft, moonlight nights of June, a year ago…happy, happy days at Saratoga- - - the golden fleeting hours at Lake George.”

Marriage 22 years old, to Chester Alan Arthur (born 5 October 1829 Fairfield Vermont; died 18 November 1886,New York,New York), lawyer, on 29 October 1859, at Calvary Protestant Episcopal Church,New York,New York. Records indicate that the wedding reception in Mrs. Herndon’s home was lavish, the rooms profuse with hanging baskets, vases and table bouquets of flowers, fruit baskets, and thousands of stewed, pickled and raw oysters, lobster and chicken salads, champagnes, brandy, whiskey, sherry, rum and Curacao.

Children
Three children, two boys, one daughter; William Lewis Arthur (10 December 1860 – 5 July 1863), Chester Alan Arthur, Jr. (25 July 1864 – 18 July 1937), Ellen “Nellie” Herndon Arthur [Pinkerton] (21 November 1871 – 6 September 1915)

Life After Marriage Chester and Ellen Arthur began their marriage living in her mother’s home. Arthur was to assume management of all of his mother-in-law’s investments and real estate holdings. Arthur would find rapid success as an attorney. Although a member of the New York State Militia with the rank of Brigadier-General and soon befriended by the likes of Governor Edwin D. Morgan, who appointed him the state’s Engineer-in-Chief, as well as many New York City and New York State political figures, he hardly earned a large enough salary to afford a luxurious lifestyle that included a three-story Lexington Avenue brownstone with expensive furnishings from Tiffany’s. It was the wealth of Ellen’s mother which enabled the couple to rapidly maintain their status in the elite circles of New York society, of which her mother was already a part.

As Ellen Arthur’s address book, preserved in the Library of Congress attests, she counted the Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts and other leading New York society families among her friends. Without the need to draw a salary large enough to keep up with such a wealthy circle, Arthur was also able to invest his time in the New York Republican Party, eventually becoming a supporter and colleague of political boss and later U.S. Senator from New York Senator Roscoe Conkling. Arthur himself did not run for any state or national office before the 1880 election, when he ran as the G.O.P. Vice Presidential candidate.
Ellen Arthur’s social network widened her husband’s political contacts. It was obvious to many observers that both of them were ambitious for the recognition and prestige that could come through his rise into a powerful political post. Just eighteen months after their wedding, the Civil War began. Through his support and currying of favor with Conkling, Arthur was awarded the position of Adjutant General of New York, with the U.S. Army rank of brigadier general. Forever afterwards, he would insist on being addressed as “General Arthur.”

Although Ellen Arthur remained in the Union territory of he rNew York home throughout the Civil War, she and her mother were distraught by the ongoing conflict, not so much out of a loyalty to the Confederacy or states’ rights but for the well-being of their relatives fighting for the South. There is suggestion of some tension between Arthur and his “little Rebel wife,” as he referred to his wife during the war.
With a high rank in the Union Army as Quartermaster General and Inspector General of State Troops, his loyalty could not be seen as compromised in any way. Certainly, he risked political attack, at the least, by acquiescing to Ellen Arthur’s insistence that he arrange for her cousin Dabney Herndon (by then a surgeon for the Confederate Army) to twice be released as a prisoner of war from Union prisons, once at Gettysburg. Further, through her husband’s discrete arrangements, Ellen Arthur was permitted to visit her cousin in prison, With Arthur continuing to successfully invest Mrs. Herndon’s wealth, her mother was also able to make substantial monetary gifts and loans to her brother-in-law Dabney Herndon so he could repair his Fredericksburg home, damaged during a Union attack on the town, and to support himself and his three sons Brodie, Jr., Dabney and James, until all of their medical practices could be re-established.

Arthur had been eager to serve on active duty in the Union Army, but legend claims that he did not because Ellen Arthur could not live with the idea of him potentially killing her kinsman. In 1863, two years before the war ended, he resigned to go into private law practice with a clientele of those pressing for war-related damages and for the first time in his career began to amass great wealth on his own.

Still, regardless of sympathy for her native South, Ellen Arthur recognized the value of currying favor with those in power. Consequently, she eagerly accepted the invitations to Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 Inauguration, and the 1874 White House wedding of President Grant’s daughter. In 1871, when President Grant appointed her husband as Collector of the Port of New York, one contemporary said there was “no happier woman” in the country than Ellen Arthur. There existed for many years a jealous rivalry between Ellen Arthur and Ellen Covert Cornell, the wife of Alonzo B. Cornell, New York Republican Party chairman and Speaker of the New York State Assembly,, both ambitious for their husbands’ political success, though the latter did so overtly, while the cooler Ellen Arthur used more personal control, and “smiled at Mrs. Cornell’s methods of resentment.” The “genteel enmity, amounting to almost a feud” was further fueled by the gossip of their defenders.
Ellen Arthur had an ethereal presence, her physicality often noted by those who met her. Her pale skin contrasted with her strikingly dark eyes and eyebrows, magnified by her round gutta percha-rimmed spectacles (she was quite near-sighted), the posture of her extremely thin figure always carried in a dignified carriage, always holding her elbows at her waist and clasping her hands at the center of her waist.

Despite her social appeal and the appearance of a charmed life, Ellen Arthur also suffered emotional difficulties. In 1863, her first-born child had died before he was even three years old. In April 1878, she was contacted by telegram that her mother, then visiting France, had died suddenly. It required that Ellen Arthur make the trans-Atlantic voyage to retrieve the remains of her mother. In light of her tremendous bond with her mother, the observations of friends that Ellen Arthur’s “shock and nervous tension” in reaction to Mrs. Herndon’s death “did much to impair her health” was significant.
The depression caused by her having to retrieve her mother’s remains was made all the more difficult by the fact that she had to undertake the responsibility alone; so fully consumed by his political career was Chester Arthur, that he declined to take the time and make the trip with her. Some years later, it was disclosed by her grandson that Ellen Arthur was on the verge of filing for separation from her husband by the end of 1879.

It would often later be claimed that her “rich contralto voice” had turned Ellen Arthur into a “leading soprano” of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, and that, “much in demand,” she responded “with grace, to requests, especially when the proceeds were to be devoted to charity.” An amateur group formed in 1866, they performed in musical competition concerts with other singing groups or at benefit concerts, but also sponsored contests for original compositions, the winning numbers being publicly premiered by the club. The Club had a significant presence in New York’s rich cultural life, a reputation enhanced by its conductor and leader Joseph Mosenthal. The group was “seldom heard in public” but had “established its fame as an unusually good male-voice chorus,” and usually drew a “large and fashionable attendance.”

So prestigious was the Mendelssohn Glee Club that one 16 February 1881 review of a recent concert “fully justified the claim that is made for it as the best drilled amateur society in this country.” The club was kept strictly to forty members, all of them male. Women pianists and singers often appeared in solo performances as part of an evening’s program, their names specifically mentioned in reviews and programs. Women were also members of the original club in the 1880s, before it disbanded and reformed as an all-male club. Ellen Arthur’s name does not appear in the available documentation of newspaper coverage of the Mendelssohn Glee Club’s performances, nor is there a suggestion at which events she may have appeared with them or what compositions she may have performed. Her membership in the group is thus, largely anecdotal, dating from after her death.

On 13 January, 1880 the New York Times reported that Ellen Arthur “is now lying dangerously ill at her home, suffering from an attack of pneumonia of a serious character. The lady was seized with the malady on Saturday last, General Arthur being at the time in Albany, and early on Sunday her illness had assumed such a severe form that he was telegraphed to return to New York at once. He took passage on a milk train, and reached this city late on Sunday night, and has since then been in constant attendance at her bedside. At a late hour last night, Mrs. Arthur was announced to be in a critical condition, and grave fears were entertained that she would not survive the attack.”

Later accounts emphasized that it was after singing in a concert hall, waiting for her carriage while standing in slippers (which would suggest a dance performance, rather than a musical one) on a city sidewalk in a driving rain or snowstorm, or extreme cold, that Ellen Arthur developed a chill that quickly became pneumonia. While the article which first reported her illness noted that she was “an amateur vocalist of most extraordinary merit” there was no mention of Ellen Arthur having recently (or ever) appeared with the Mendelssohn Glee Club or any other singing group. Published records of fundraiser or other concerts in New Yorkat that time make no mention of that club; this omission, of course, does not preclude the possibility they may have done so or that Mrs. Arthur sang with the male group at such an event, or earlier ones. One suggestion that she may have joined in some concerts where members of the club also performed was the newspaper report of her church funeral service, where the “Mendelssohn Glee Club gave a grand rendering of the hymn beginning, ‘There is a blessed home beyond this life of woe.’” It does not, however, mention any affiliation she may have had with the club or what prompted their appearance.

Other later accounts claim that his wife was unconscious by the time Chester Arthur reached her side and unable to recognize or acknowledge him, highly romanticizing the incident or perhaps providing a pathos to suggest guilt he felt at being involved in political business when she fell ill. In fact, he had been in Albany, preoccupied with the task of helping to engineer the re-election of the controversial political boss and his mentor Roscoe Conkling to the U.S. Senate. Whether Arthur suffered a lifetime of remorse for this, however, is purely speculative.

Death 42 years old on January 12, 1880 at New York, New York
Burial Rural Cemetery; Albany New York"

First Lady Biography: Ellen Arthur
This series provides biographies of all the First Ladies of the United States, as if spoken by each of them in their own words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HdYy1lCFSE

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Wayne Brandon LTC Bill Koski Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SSgt Robert Marx PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SPC Margaret Higgins MSgt Jason McClish AN Christopher Crayne SPC Tom DeSmet SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT (Join to see) SSG David Andrews Lt Col Charlie Brown

Maj Marty Hogan I taught U.S. History and I forgot about this president. He got a short job because of an assassination.

Pneumonia was a scourge before antibiotics.