Ellen Arthur

First Lady

• Born: August 30, 1837
• Birthplace: Culpeper, Virginia
• Died: January 12, 1880
• Place of death: New York, New York

President:Chester A. Arthur 1881-1885

Overview

Very little is known about Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur. In part, this is because she did not live to see her husband serve in the White House. She died in the prime of life, just months before Chester A. Arthur would become vice president.

Early Life

Ellen Lewis Herndon (Nell to her family, friends, and future husband) was born on August 30, 1837, at Culpeper Court House, Virginia, in the house that her uncle Dr. Brodie S. Herndon had built. Her family’s pedigree was distinguished, and her southern roots ran deep. In 1674, an immigrant ancestor, William Herndon, presumably English, received patented lands in Virginia. At Ellen’s birth, her father, William Lewis Herndon, was a rising young officer in the U.S. Navy; her mother, Frances Elizabeth Hansbrough Herndon, was also descended from a reputable and presumably wealthy southern family.

Young Ellen was an only child, growing up in a doting, close-knit extended family. At the age of two or three, she and her parents moved to Fredericksburg, their ancestral seat, only to move again in 1842 to Washington, D.C., when Ellen was five. Her naval officer father was assigned to assist his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, U.S.N., who directed the Depot of Charts and Instruments (the future U.S. Naval Observatory). Ellen grew up in the capital city, her home until she was in her late teens.

Instead of being educated at home, as girls usually were in southern families, Ellen was sent to school in Washington, D.C., although little is known about the extent of her schooling. Her family attended Saint John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, where the city’s most prestigious families were members and where Ellen sang in the choir. Her most notable gift seemed to be her lovely operatic singing voice, deeply admired by all who knew her.

Her personality also appears to have been a strong asset: She was called affectionate, sweet, and lovable by those who knew her. Later on, as a married woman, she remembered the names of all the kitchen and dining staff at a mansion she visited only on her birthdays. In a day and age when physical beauty was considered an unmarried woman’s greatest asset, Ellen was reportedly not handsome or beautiful, as were her mother and many of her cousins. She had brown hair and fair skin, was slender, of medium height, and wore eyeglasses.

In 1853, when she was sixteen, her Uncle Maury invited her and another niece to accompany him and his two teenage daughters to Europe while he attended a naval conference in Brussels. Afterward, he and his four companions toured the capitals of northern Europe as well as London. The trip made a lasting impression on Ellen, who afterward loved travel and changes of scenery.

By 1856, Ellen had fallen in love with a prepossessing New Yorklawyer, Chester A. Arthur. The two met when his friend Dabney Herndon, a medical student and cousin of Ellen, introduced Chester to her at her home in New York. Chester was seven years her senior.

No two backgrounds could have been more unlike than those of Ellen Herndon and Chester Alan Arthur. If it had not been for the fact that Chester was already a prospering partner in a law firm, their union would have been unthinkable. Chester was a northerner to the core. His birth is not well documented, but it is believed to have taken place in a rude log cabin on October 5, 1830, in remote Fairfield, Vermont. He was one of many children of William and Malvina Arthur. His father was a Baptist preacher and a committed abolitionist. Chester received a good general education from his father and graduated from college in 1848. Pursuing his law career in New York City, he had never even been to the South until, at age twenty-eight, he visited his fiancé’s relatives in Fredericksburg.

His courtship with Ellen lasted three years. One long, passionate love letter from Chester to Ellen has survived, revealing an interesting glimpse of the warm-blooded young woman who was to become his wife. Writing to her on her twentieth birthday, two years before their marriage, Chester mused, “If I were with you now . . . you would come and sit by me. You would put your arms around my neck and press your soft sweet lips over my eyes. I can feel them now.” Her fiancé was over six feet tall, fair, and considered handsome by all.

Ellen’s other great love, her father, was taken from her during her youth when he died tragically at sea. If Ellen had deeply loved her father while he was alive, she idolized him after his death. A group of New York citizens, as a tribute to the heroic commander, gave his widow a house in the city, at 34 West 21st Street, which she gratefully accepted.

After the tragic death of Ellen’s father, Chester involved himself in Ellen and her widowed mother’s legal and financial affairs. Finally, he acquiesced to Ellen’s choice of October 25, 1859, as their wedding day, which happened to coincide with the birthday of her father. It took place in the bride’s church, Calvary Episcopal, in Manhattan. It was likely an elegant affair, with the clothes-conscious Ellen garbed in the latest bridal fashion. For two weeks afterward they honeymooned, returning to live with Ellen’s mother in her Manhattan home.

Marriage and Family

The Civil War erupted in the spring of 1861. No sooner had the guns of Fort Sumter fallen silent than Chester found himself on active duty with the rank of brigadier general. This appalled his southern in-laws, especially his mother-in-law, who was openly hostile to the Union. All of Ellen’s male relatives fought on the Confederate side. Chester’s friend and Ellen’s cousin Dabney Herndon was a prisoner of war for a time in a prison camp near New York City, where Chester permitted Ellen to visit regularly. Although the couple attended President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1865, Ellen remained a Confederate at heart. While Chester jokingly referred to his “little rebel wife,” the strain that the war created on the young marriage may have led to his resignation from the army in the middle of the war. His nearly two years of active duty as assistant quartermaster general, and then as quartermaster general of New York, were frantically busy ones. Hence, the Civil War years must have borne down hard on Ellen, with an absentee husband and fears for the safety of her loved ones.

Soon after the war began, Ellen’s mother made plans to leave for Europe, where she remained for the rest of her life. Chester and Ellen moved into an elegant boardinghouse. By then they were the proud parents of a baby boy, born in December, 1860, whom Ellen promptly named after her father, William Lewis. Her intense joy at his birth turned to grief when the little boy died suddenly in July, 1863, at age two. His death, wrote Chester to his brother, was sudden, due to some “affection of the brain.” The effect on Ellen was devastating. “Nell is broken hearted. I fear much for her health. You know how her heart was wrapped up in her dear boy,” wrote Chester.

The young mother’s agony was mitigated when she found herself pregnant with a second child. Chester Alan Arthur II, called Alan, was born exactly a year after her tragic loss. With the war over nine months later, the Arthurs moved out of their boardinghouse rooms in May, 1865. Their new abode, a tastefully appointed, two-story brownstone on fashionable Lexington Avenue, would soon resonate with sumptuous dinner parties. Chester’s prosperous law practice, coupled with his involvement in New York politics, made the family rich. On the day that Chester was appointed collector of the Port of New York, November 21, 1871, a daughter was born, Ellen Herndon Arthur.

In the postwar years, Ellen’s interests appear to have been exclusively centered on family, fine living, fine dining, and climbing the social ladder. Her address book was crammed with the names of well-heeled and well-connected Republicans. Her husband’s political ambitions had her utmost approbation, although at a cost that at times was too high for her. It seems that she never found a way to reconcile her desire for his political advancement with her need to have him at home with her and the children. The more she furthered his interests with her social calls and invitations, the more he dissatisfied her as a family man.

Legacy

Added to the strains of her marriage was another deep sorrow for Ellen, the illness and death of her mother, an expatriate living in France. The two had always been very close. Ellen made the sad voyage to visit her stricken mother in the spring of 1878, only to return with her mother’s body for burial in the United States. The emotional toll affected her health in the long run. Ellen caught cold one icy night waiting for her carriage after she had sung at a charity concert. As usual, she was unaccompanied by her husband. Her immune system may have been compromised before this, because in a matter of a few days her cold developed into pneumonia. During that time her husband was away, attending to politics in Albany, New York. When he received a telegram informing him of Ellen’s condition, he left immediately, but by the time he reached her side, she was in a coma. She died the next day, January 12, 1880. Apparently her illness had aggravated a heart condition, which contributed to her untimely death at age forty-two. She left behind her two children, Ellen, age eight, and Chester Alan, age fifteen.

His wife’s death devastated Chester. After her funeral, which took place in the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue (she was then laid to rest in Albany), he would pace up and down his neighborhood until the early hours of the morning, pouring out his grief. Six months after Ellen’s death, Chester was nominated vice president and, in the spring of 1881, moved with his children to the U.S. capital. President James A. Garfield died from a gunshot wound six months later, elevating Arthur to the presidency.

Upon being congratulated by his wife’s Uncle Brodie, Chester said to him, “Honors to me are not what they once were.” When his young daughter, Ellen, presented him with flowers one evening to congratulate him, he broke down sobbing, “There is nothing worth having now.” The flowers might have reminded him of his wife’s favorite violets; in his three-and-one-half-year term as president, fresh violets always graced his wife’s photograph in the White House. Another touching reminder of his devotion to her memory and her pervasive influence on him was his regular attendance at his late wife’s former church, Saint John’s, where she had sung in the choir as a girl. In 1883, he donated a stained glass window in his wife’s memory, asking that it be placed on the south side of the church, where he could see it from his private quarters in the White House. The inscription on the window reads “To the Glory of God and in memory of Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur entered into life January 12, 1880.”

Bibliography

Arthur, Chester A. Chester A. Arthur Papers. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1959. The papers include not only his presidential papers but also letters and many other manuscripts predating his presidency. Biographical information about Ellen Arthur is contained in the biography by John W. Herndon.

Howe, George Frederick. Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics . Reprint. New York: F. Ungar, 1966. This biography first appeared in 1935 and is the first scholarly biography of Chester A. Arthur, which contains a little information on Ellen Arthur.

McConnell, Burt, and Jane McConnell. Our First Ladies. New York: Crowell, 1969. Chapter on Ellen Arthur contains a newspaper story which describes Ellen Arthur’s room at the Arthur home in New York.

Reeves, Thomas C. Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. New York: Knopf, 1975. A sensitive biography of Chester A. Arthur, with the fullest treatment of Ellen Arthur of any published source.

Sadler, Christine. Children in the White House. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. Information on the women of the Arthur family, specifically Ellen and Chester Arthur’s daughter Nell.

Watson, Robert P. The Presidents’ Wives: Reassessing the Office of First Lady. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000. A statistical and research-oriented assessment of the roles and the long-ranging impacts of the First Ladies as presidential partners.