Cornelia Phillips Spencer, a writer during the Civil War era, was born March 20 1825 in Harlem, New York where her father conducted a boys’ school. She was the youngest of three children. Her family moved to Chapel Hill in 1826 when her father, James Phillips, took a post as Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina. Cornelia grew up in Chapel Hill and was educated in Latin, Greek, French, literature, music, drawing, and needlework. In 1851, at age twenty-six, Cornelia met twenty-two-year-old James Munroe Spencer, a law student. They married in 1855 and moved to Alabama, where their only child, Julia “June” James Spencer, was born in 1859. In June 1861, James Spencer died after a long…
Tag: Civil War Writers
Civil War Writers
Mary Bedinger Mitchell
Mary Bedinger Mitchell was born August 3, 1850. Her father, Henry Bedinger, served as America’s first ambassador to Denmark. In 1858, the family went to Shepherdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia), where Henry had grown up. In the 1840s, he came down with pneumonia after giving a speech to a cheering crowd. He died two weeks later. Mary Bedinger Mitchell The family lived for a while with her father’s sister, Henrietta Bedinger Lee, and her husband, Edmund Jennings Lee, the first cousin of Robert E. Lee. In 1859, Mary’s mother bought “Poplar Grove,” near Shepherdstown and had an addition built onto the house. She also hired a tutor to teach her children at home. After the Battle of Antietam, which occurred…
Catherine Stratton Ladd
Civil War Nurse and Educator Catherine Stratton was born in Richmond Virginia on October 28, 1808. While she was still an infant, her father, James Stratton, an Irish immigrant, fell off a boat and drowned. Catherine was educated in Richmond at the same school attended by poet Edgar Allen Poe and they were playmates. Catherine Stratton Ladd At the age of 20, Catherine married George Williamson Livermore Ladd, an artist who had studied with Samuel F. B. Morse in Boston. The Ladds first lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where George painted portraits. It was there that Catherine began to write stories, poems and essays, particularly about art and education. These were published in Southern periodicals, under such pseudonyms as Minnie…