Cornelia Grinnell Willis's Civil War

 

Cornelia Grinnell Willis (1825-1904)

Massachusetts's New Bedford Whaling Museum has this poor 

photo of New Bedford-born Cornelia Willis in her old age, 

which I have tried to clear up a bit. 

Is that a quilt in her lap?

When Civil War commenced in 1861 Cornelia Willis had been married to successful newspaper publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis for about 14 years.

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1807-1867)

Willis was known as quite a dandy. He was famous at the time 

as a poet but his real success was in publishing newspapers, particularly The Home Journal, predecessor to Town & Country.

Cornelia was Willis's second wife marrying him when she was about 22. She met him in Washington where she lived with her adoptive parents U.S. Representative Joseph Grinnell (her father's brother) and Sarah Russell Grinnell (her mother's sister.) A complicated family here of double aunts and double uncles....

Cornelia became stepmother to Nathaniel's four-year-old daughter Imogen, whose mother Mary Stace Willis had died in childbirth along with her second baby, much to the sorrow of the families and Imogen's nursemaid, Harriet Jacobs.

By 1861 Cornelia had four living children of her own. Her last child was a daughter born in the fall of 1860 who died at birth. They were living in Cornwall, New York, 40 miles up the Hudson from New York City in a 14-room house they built called Idlewild.

Idlewild designed by Calvert Vaux still stands.

The Grinnells and the Willises were successful, brilliant and contentious. Nathaniel, considered the highest paid newspaper editor and writer of his time, was brother to Sarah Willis Parton, who published as Fanny Fern, lauded as the highest paid female journalist at the same time. Nathaniel refused to print Sarah's articles. Sarah published a novel Ruth Hall in which she ridiculed a man much like Nathaniel. By the time of the war brother and sister were not speaking to each other.

Is this Uncle Sam roasting Presidential candidate James Buchanan,

doughface Northerner with Southern sympathies?

Nathaniel had a reputation as a "doughface," a northerner who defended slavery. His newspaper was praised by Jefferson Davis as one of "the only Northern papers that the South can securely trust." Lydia Maria Child noted that even after war began his newspaper was not violently pro-slavery but subtly and systematically so.

Cornelia, on the other hand, was from a Quaker family with several members outspoken in support of abolition. How she and her husband handled those differences of opinion is up in the air. There were other conflicts including a public adultery trial by actor Edwin Forrest who accused Nathaniel of seducing his wife and attacked him with a whip.

The whipped seducer. Public ridicule.

As the war began the Willises were employing the nursemaid who'd cared for Imogen when she was young. Harriet Jacobs was an African-American woman, an escaped slave from North Carolina. Cornelia rehired her after the birth of her second child. 

Hattie Jacobs spent her evenings after the Willis children were abed writing her autobiography, a hard-to-believe tale of hiding in an attic for several years before she found her way to New York. She published it with Lydia Maria Child's editorial assistance just before the war under the pseudonym Linda Brent. 

Cornelia knew quite a bit of Harriet's story. After the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act gave slaveholders legal rights to reclaim escapees Harriet worried about being kidnapped. Cornelia sent Harriet and her own youngest child to her family home in New Bedford when they thought she needed to hide. 

When Harriet read that one of that family was in New York she told Cornelia, who suggested she use some of her fortune to purchase Harriet. Harriet refused to be considered a piece of merchandise, but Cornelia went ahead, raising funds from friends to pay the Norcom family $300 (over $9,000 today.)

Louisa Jacobs (1833-1927)

When war began Harriet moved to Alexandria, Virginia where she and daughter Louisa maintained a  school for freed people. Nathaniel Willis also went to Washington reporting on the war for The Home Journal, which had been neutral on the slavery issue before the war. The paper now took the Union side, losing its Southern readers and many Northerners too. Willis's 1890 biographer Henry A. Beers explained his conflict:

"He was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with the South, and a liking for 'those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners, incapable of a short word or a mean action,' whom he had known at Saratoga years before.... the [newspaper's readers],  a large proportion of whose subscribers were in the South, had fallen off seriously."

Cornelia remained at Idlewild when war began with her children but income was tight and she rented out her mansion, returning to live with her father at New Bedford. In 1863 she reclaimed the house, turning it into a girls' school. By then Nathaniel lived in New York, refusing to visit his family and home in reduced circumstances. His health was failing (suffering from seizures among other crises.) He died on his 61st birthday in 1867 at Idlewild. 

1863

We can see Cornelia's fortunes through ads in the New York papers

1867

She leased the school.

She offered the house for sale.

The Willis women and children remained quite close to Harriet and her daughter Louisa, who was in boarding school before the Civil War. Tracing their histories one can see lives intertwined throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.

Imogen Willis Eddy (1842-1904) at Harvard

"We do all the computing connected with the meridian circle, our special work being to locate the position of certain stars…Harvard is the only college that employs women as mathematical computers." Imogen.

The Willises often provided financial gifts; the Jacobses provided homes as when Imogen lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts working at Harvard College Observatory. Imogen boarded at Harriet & Louisa's boarding house.

The house on Auburn still stands. Imogen was just one

of many brilliant Willises. The youngest boy Bailey Willis

became an eminent geologist. 

Washington Times

Cornelia had lived at his home in Washington for 8 years before her death in 1904.