Whistler, Swift, Kingsley, McNeill, Cammann, Rodewald, Flagg, Boardman, Gibbs, Chew, Palmer, Easterbrook, Lorillard, Dunscombe, Vallance, Bohlen, Halbach, Fairfax

George Washington Whistler (19 May 1800 – 7 April 1849; see Images 7–8, 21) was born at Fort Wayne, Northwest Territory (now Indiana). He was one of the fifteen children and youngest son of Major John Whistler (Ulster County, Ireland 1758 – Bellefontaine, MO 2 September 1829), commandant of Fort Wayne, and Anne (Bishop) Whistler (Ireland 1760 – Newport, Campbell, KY 5 April 1814).1 His fourteen siblings were Edward (Pennsylvania c. 1780 – Ohio 1834), William (Hagerstown, MD c. 1782 – Newport, Campbell County, KY 4 December 1863), Sarah (Hagerstown, MD 26 September 1786 –Detroit, MI 4 October 1874), John (Hagerstown, MD c. 1787 – Detroit, MI, home of James and Sarah (Whistler) Abbott 1 December 1813); Samuel and an unnamed twin (Hagerstown, MD b. and d. c. 1788), Catherine (Hagerstown, MD 1788 – Detroit, MI 14 October 1874), Rebecca (c. 1790–1826), Eliza (c. 1791 – Fort Howard, Michigan Territory [now Green Bay, WI] – 4 June 1823), Ann (Fort Washington [near Cincinnati], OH 1 September 1794 – Litchfield, CT 29 March 1829), James A. (c. 1796 – Baton Rouge, LA 11 October 1843), Harriet (Fort Wayne, Northwest Territory [now Indiana] 1798 – Chicago, IL 14 January 1873), Charles (c. 1799 – Louisville, KY 15 January 1831), and Caroline Frances Abbott (Detroit, MI 25 December 1802 – Sandwich [now Windsor], ON, Canada 31 December 1842).2 Only two are mentioned in the diaries: his eldest brother, William (see Image 34), and his brother James.

George Washington Whistler was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point in July 1814 and graduated in July 1819 with the rank of second lieutenant in the Artillery Corps. He served as a topographer in 1819 and again in 1820–1821. In 1821–1822, he was assistant professor of drawing at West Point. From 1822 to 1828, he was attached to the commission tracing the international boundary between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods. In August 1829, he was promoted to first lieutenant. In 1830, together with his future brother-in-law William Gibbs McNeill (see Image 31), he surveyed the route and supervised the initial construction of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad. In 1831–1832, they supervised construction of the Paterson and Hudson River Railroad in New Jersey. In 1832–1833, they surveyed the route and began the construction of the Stonington Railroad from Providence, Rhode Island, to Stonington, Connecticut. From 1834 to 1837, Whistler was superintendent of the machine shops of the Proprietors of Locks and Canals of Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was chiefly involved in designing, building, and selecting locomotives for the Boston and Lowell Railroad, which was completed in May 1835. In 1837, in addition to his completing the construction of the Stonington Railroad, he and McNeill surveyed the Nashua–Concord (New Hampshire) portion of the Concord Railroad. Whistler’s involvement, from sometime in the 1830s to 1842, in the building of the Western Railroad (Boston–Worcester–Springfield–Greenbush, NY) lay chiefly in planning and supervising the construction of the section over the Berkshire Hills. He worked on this project with his two brothers-in-law, Captain William Henry Swift and Major William Gibbs McNeill. By early 1840, because of Swift’s resignation and the expiration of McNeill’s contract, only Whistler was left to supervise the completion of the Western Railroad, which formally opened on 4 January 1842.

On 11 May 1842, Whistler signed a contract with the Russian government to be the consulting engineer for the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway. The St. Petersburg diaries (1843–1848) of his wife, Anna (McNeill) Whistler (1804–1881; see Images 1–5), relate in great detail both his professional and personal life in Russia. Gradually, Whistler’s health became undermined by the worsening of his heart condition, exacerbated by cholera, and in April 1849 he died with his work unfinished.3

Whistler married twice. His first wife, with whom he eloped in 1821, was Mary Roberdeau Swift (8 August 1804 – 9 December 1827; see Image 10). They had three children: George William (1822–1869; see Images 12–13), Joseph Swift (1824–1840), and Deborah Delano (1825–1908; see Images 17–19, 21). The biographies of George William and Deborah Delano in the 1840s are taken up in extensive detail in “The Whistlers as They Were in the 1840s” and, for George William, in the Winans biography as well, and will not be discussed in this essay. Anna Whistler did remark, however, that January first of each year, the day Joseph Swift Whistler died in 1840, had become for her “a consecrated day.”

Whistler married secondly in 1831 Anna Matilda McNeill (27 September 1804 – 1 January 1881). They had five sons: James Abbott (1834–1903; see Images 24–29), William McNeill (1836–1900; see Images 27, 30), Kirk Boott (1838–1842), Charles Donald (1841–1843), and John Bouttatz (1845–1846). The biographies of James Abbott and William McNeill in the 1840s are taken up in extensive detail in “The Whistlers as They Were in the 1840s” and will not be discussed in this essay. The biographies of their three siblings, who died young, will also not be discussed in this essay, as Anna Whistler recorded the deaths of Charles Donald and John Bouttatz in detail in the diaries, referred to all three of them on the anniversaries of their deaths, and delighted in remarking on their baby ways even after their deaths.

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William Whistler (Hagerstown, MD c. 1782 – Newport, Kentucky 4 December 1863; see Image 34)4 was an officer in the U.S. Army. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the First Infantry in 1801. He participated as a first lieutenant in the Battle of Maguaga, Michigan, 9 August 1812, where the Americans gained a complete victory. On 16 August 1812, he was taken prisoner, and on the last day of 1812 he became a captain. He was stationed at Green Bay, Wisconsin, from 1817 to 1819, and in 1820 was temporarily in command. He was brevetted major 31 December 1822, for ten years’ faithful service in one grade. He was again at Green Bay in 1826, where he remained for two years as commandant. He was then sent to Fort Niagara. In 1832, he was sent to regarrison Fort Dearborn. In July 1834, at Mackinac, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned to the Seventh Infantry. From August 1835 to 10 September 1835, he was commandant of Fort Gibson, again from 20 April to 5 May 1836, and again from 29 January to 6 February 1839. On 7 March 1839, the Seventh Infantry, which had been stationed at Fort Gibson for almost twenty years, received orders to proceed to Fort Smith, from where they traveled by keel boats to Little Rock and from there to Tampa Bay, Florida, to take part in the wretched campaign to drive out the few remaining Seminoles. Lt. Colonel Whistler was on several occasions a member of a court martial of mutinous soldiers. He became a full colonel in July 1845 and was put in command of the Fourth Infantry. He participated in the Mexican War. In 1846, at Metamoros, Mexico, he was found guilty of charges of disobedience of orders, drunkenness on duty and conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. He was sentenced to be cashiered. President James K. Polk (see Image 50) disapproved the sentence and, on 6 October 1846, ordered him on duty. From the close of the War with Mexico to his retirement in 1861, he was stationed at Detroit, Michigan, and Madison Barracks, New York. He married on 30 May 1802 in Detroit, Michigan, Mary Julia Fearson (1787–1878). They were they were the parents of six surviving children: John Harrison (1807–1873), Caroline Frances (Whistler) Bloodgood (1810–1893), Mary Ann (Whistler) Paul (1815–1871), Gwinthlean Harriet (Whistler) Kinzie (1818–1894), Joseph Nelson Garland (1822–1899; see Image 35), and Louise Ann (Whistler) Helm (1828–1883).

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The daughter of William Whistler and Mary Julia (Fearson) Whistler, Caroline Frances (Fort Wayne, IN 12 March 1810 – Milwaukee, WI 26 November 1893), her husband, and two of her children are mentioned in the diaries.5 She married in about 1826 Lt. William Bloodgood (Albany, NY 1801 – Nashotah, WI 1 August 1874), USMA Class of 1824. He had served in Sackett’s Harbor, New York; on frontier duty at Fort Howard, Wisconsin; in Bangor, Maine; and at Fort Niagara, New York; with two years’ tour of duty on recruiting service. He had resigned on 31 December 1836, at the rank of first lieutenant, Second Infantry. In civilian life, he became a farmer and practiced his profession at Pine Grove, New York, near Albany, from 1837 to 1854, and then at Nashotah, Wisconsin, from 1859 until his death. It is at Pine Grove that Anna Whistler left Charles Donald, her fourth child, for at least a week, when she traveled to Geneva, New York, for the wedding of Louisa Josephine Swift on 22 June 1843.

Caroline (Whistler) Bloodgood, called “Cousin Carri” in the diaries, appears there in Anna Whistler’s reminiscences of those days in Pine Grove and of hurrying back to Stonington, where James was seriously ill. Cousin Carri later apparently suffered an accident of some kind that required the use of crutches, and gladdening news of her recovery and that of “her restored husband and snug home” suggest a series of family misfortunes. All of this information was conveyed to Deborah Whistler by her first cousin, Eliza Van Vechten, in two separate letters.

The two Bloodgood children also mentioned are George (Maine 1830 – Jackson, MI January 1909), who in 1843 was about thirteen years old, and Wilkins (1841–1862), who was about two years old. George later became an Episcopalian minister. Wilkins served during the Civil War in the First Michigan Infantry, enlisting on 1 May 1861 at Detroit. He died (at the rank of captain) on 23 September 1862 at Cliffbourne Hospital in Washington, DC, from wounds received in action at Bull Run, Virginia, on 30 August 1862.

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The son of William Whistler and Mary Julia (Fearson) Whistler, Joseph Nelson Garland Whistler (Fort Howard, Michigan Territory [now Green Bay, WI] 19 October 1822 – Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, NY 20 April 1899; see Image 35)6 was a member of the Class of 1846 of the United States Military Academy at West Point. On graduation, he was promoted in the Army to brevet second lieutenant in the Eighth Infantry. On retirement in 1886, he held the rank of colonel in the Fifteenth Infantry (promoted 1883). He served from 1846 to 1848 in the War with Mexico, being engaged in the Siege of Vera Cruz in March 1847, the Battle of Cerro Gordo in April 1847, the Battle of Contreras in August 1847, the Battle of Churubusco in August 1847, the Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847, and the Assault and Capture of the City of Mexico, 13–17 September 1847. He served also from 1861 to 1866 in the Civil War. He was transferred to the First Infantry in September 1866. For the remainder of his career, he served in Dakota, Kentucky, Kansas, Montana, and Minnesota. He retired from active service in October 1886. He is buried in Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, New York.

He married on 16 August 1846 in Albany, New York, Eliza Cobham Hall (New York State 16 April 1819 – Waukesha, WI 14 August 1887), daughter of Margaret Eliza (Bloodgood) and Major N.N. Hall, formerly assistant inspector general U.S. Eighth Army and one of the heroes of Fort Erie. She was also the granddaughter of Francis Bloodgood of Albany, New York, whose mother, Caroline (Whistler) Bloodgood, was Major George Washington Whistler’s niece. They had four surviving children. She is buried in Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, New York.

They are both mentioned in the diaries in 1846, he in a letter from George William Whistler, announcing that J.N.G Whistler had to participate in the War with Mexico. Anna Whistler remarks that his wife, whom he had just married, would at this point begin to understand the trials of being a soldier’s wife.

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Little is known of James (c. 1796 – Baton Rouge, LA 11 October 1843). The notice of his death reads: “We notice the death, at Baton Rouge, on Wednesday last, of James A. Whistler Esq., brother of Colonel Whistler, in command at that station.” Colonel Whistler is James’s brother, William. James was said to have “no family,” and he was not in the military forces. His death was announced to Major Whistler by Anna Whistler, who recorded in her diaries on 12 March 1844 that she had learned of it from a letter Deborah Delano Whistler had received from her first cousin, Eliza (Hamilton) Van Vechten.7

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Sarah Whistler (Hagerstown, MD 26 September 1786 – Detroit, MI 4 October 1874) was the oldest daughter and third child of Major John Whistler and Anne (Bishop) Whistler. She married James Abbott (1775–1858) of Detroit on 1 November 1804 at Fort Dearborn, Rev. John Kinzie officiating. Theirs is said to have been Chicago’s first wedding. “James Abbott, the first president of the Michigan Insurance Company, was a very prominent and successful merchant and fur trader … physically, a strong man, inclining to corpulency in his later years. As a businessman, … very methodical, precise and economical … As a banker … conscientious, firm and vigilant … Though at times a little abrupt in manner, he possessed a social and kindly disposition.”8 He was called Judge Abbott because he was a Justice of the Peace.9 They do not appear in the diaries but are mentioned here because George Washington and Anna (McNeill) Whistler named their first child, James Abbott, for Sarah (Whistler) Abbott’s husband.

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Major George Washington Whistler’s sister, Catherine Ann (Whistler) Hamilton (1788 – 14 October 1874)10 is not mentioned in the diaries. The second daughter of Major John and Ann (Bishop) Whistler, she married in Chicago on 14 May 1806 Major Thomas Hamilton (New York City 1781 – St. Louis, MO 30 July 1833) of the U.S. Army. Their daughter, Eliza M. (Hamilton) Van Vechten (Fort Snelling [now St. Paul, MN] 9 July 1824 – Albany, NY 30 December 1898), and some of Eliza’s children are mentioned.

Eliza M. Hamilton married at Springfield, Massachusetts, on 22 September 1842 Abraham Van Vechten (Albany, NY 12 December 1819 – West Point, NY 7 May 1894), an attorney. Their first child, whose name we do not know, died. Eliza was again pregnant when Anna Whistler recorded that she had written to Deborah Delano Whistler, her first cousin. A second child, Hamilton Van Vechten, was born 3 October 1844 (d. 19 May 1894). Eliza (sometimes called Eliza Van Vee) is also the correspondent who announced to Deborah Delano Whistler the death of Major Whistler’s brother James (c. 1796 – Baton Rouge, LA 11 October 1843).

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Mary Roberdeau (Swift) Whistler (see Image 10) was the daughter of Deborah (Delano) (Nantucket Island, MA September 1762 – New York City 3 June 1824) and Dr. Foster Swift (Boston 20 January 1760 – New London, CT 18 August 1835) (married 18 February 1783).

The Swifts had six children. Jonathan (b. 1785) died young, as did Deborah Ann (1790 – December 1805). The three who survived into adulthood, besides Mary Roberdeau, were Joseph Gardner (31 December 1783 – 23 July 1865; see Image 11), Sarah Delano (24 February 1788 – 11 May 1839), and William Henry (6 November 1800 – 7 April 1879).

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Sarah Delano (Swift) Adams, who had married Eli Adams (14 March 1770 – 18 July 1822) and was widowed, had helped with the care of her sister Mary’s children, who, at their mother’s death, were about five years and five months, about three years and four months, and about two years and two months of age. They had remained in New London and seem to have lived in the home of their grandfather, the widowed Dr. Foster Swift, until George Washington Whistler married Anna McNeill in 1831. It is from the correspondence of members of the Swift family that we learn the little we know about George William, Joseph Swift, and Deborah Delano as children: “Deborah is a wonderful scholar for her age – reads well in any book, and is now commencing a little system of geography and arithmetic. she was at one time rather petulant – but now much changed – George does not love his Book. Joe is a good scholar.”11

Sarah had died by the time of the St. Petersburg diaries, but her daughter, Sarah Adams (29 December 1821 – 1876), appears in them as a correspondent of Anna Whistler’s, who recorded writing to Sarah Adams in April 1844. Sarah Adams’s second letter especially assuaged the neglect Anna Whistler was feeling from her other family correspondents.

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Joseph Gardner Swift (Nantucket Island, MA 31 December 1783 – Geneva, NY 21 July 1865; see Image 11)12 was one of two cadets and graduates of the Class of 1802, the first class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He graduated with the rank of second lieutenant and served at the Military Academy (1802–1804); as superintending engineer of the construction of Fort Johnston, NC (1804–1807); again at the Military Academy (1807); as superintending engineer in the erection of Governor’s Island Batteries, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, and in general supervision of the defenses of the Northeastern Coast (1808–1809); and as superintending engineer of the fortifications of the Carolina and Georgia harbors (1809–1812 and 1812–1813). Between 11 June 1805 and 19 February 1814, he was promoted from first lieutenant, Corps of Engineers, to brevet brigadier-general for meritorious services. In 1812, he was chief engineer and aide-de-camp to Major-General Pinckney. In the War of 1812 with Great Britain, he served chiefly in the Dept. of New York, Staten Island, St. Lawrence River, city of New York (including Brooklyn and Harlem Heights; see Image 42). After the War of 1812, he was superintending engineer of the construction of the fortifications of New York Harbor (1815–1817); member of the Board for rebuilding the Capitol at Washington (1817); (ex-officio) superintendent of the Military Academy (July 1812 – July 1817) and its inspector (April – November 1818); and member of the Board of Engineers for the Atlantic Coast of the United States (April – November 1818). He resigned from the U.S. Army on 12 November 1818. In civilian life, the posts he held included: surveyor of U.S. revenue for the port of New York (1818–1826); cotton planter, Haywood County, Tennesee (1828); chief engineer of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad (1828–1829); chief engineer of the New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain Railroad (1830–1831); chief engineer of the New York and Harlem Railroad (1832–1833); and civil engineer in the service of the United States, superintending harbor improvements on the Lakes (1829–1845). He aided in suppressing Canada border disturbances in 1839, and in 1841 was appointed by the president to be a member of a mission to the British Provinces, with reference to a treaty with Great Britain. He was offered the post of U.S. commissioner of patents but declined. He was a member of several scientific and historical societies and received the degree of LLD from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1843.

Joseph Gardner Swift appears in the diaries as a correspondent with Major Whistler and as guardian connected with the welfare of his nephew, George William Whistler. Anna Whistler records that they received a letter from “the General” announcing that George William Whistler had left New York an hour earlier on the sea trip he was taking for his health in late 1843.

Joseph Gardner Swift married on 6 June 1805 in North Carolina Louisa Margaret Walker (Wilmington, NC 14 October 1788 – Geneva, NY 15 November 1855).13 Two of their children are mentioned in the diaries: Louisa Josephine (called Josée) (30 April 1821 – 16 January 1859) and McRee (New York City 15 April 1819 – New Brunswick, NJ 5 April 1896).

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Louisa Josephine married on 22 June 1843 Peter Richards Jr. (New London, CT 28 October 1811 – Geneva, NY 30 August 1893). After the death of Louisa Josephine, he married her first cousin, Sarah Adams (29 December 1821 – 1876). He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Anna Whistler records in her diaries that she attended the wedding of Louisa Josephine on 22 June 1843 in Geneva, New York, about two months prior to leaving for St. Petersburg.

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McRee Swift became a civil engineer. He spent almost a year at Hobart College and in 1836 was appointed a junior assistant on the surveys of the Long Island Railroad, under General William Gibbs McNeill, Anna Whistler’s brother. Later in 1836, he went to Fort Caswell, North Carolina, and continued his professional studies under the direction of his brother, Alexander J. Swift (1810–1847) of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He spent the next six years engaged in railway engineering in New England: the Boston and Albany (Western) Railroad; the Pittsfield and North Adams Railroad; and the extension of the New Haven and Hartford Railroad to Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, he was appointed superintending engineer of the Wilmington and Raleigh Railroad in North Carolina. From 1846 to 1850, he was superintending engineer of various branches of the New York and Erie Railroad and the Rochester and Genesee Valley Railroad. In 1851, he went to Europe with his father for a year of travel. On his return, he worked until 1856 as chief engineer of the Rochester and Genesee Valley and the Avon, Genesee, and Mount Morris Railroads. In 1856, he became engineer and superintendent of a manufacturing and construction company and eventually its president. In 1874, he was elected a member of the Commission on Streets and Sewers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, resigning after eight years as president. He was at the time of his death a senior warden of Christ Church. He was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. He was considered one of the wealthiest men of New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was the twenty-third member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, active from 1852 to 1888. He bequeathed to the Society the sum of one thousand dollars in memory of his father, the income of which was to be used for the purchase of rare books and maps for its library and models for its museum.

McRee Swift married on 15 September 1842 Abby Hortense Chew (1821 – New Brunswick, NJ 10 April 1898). Anna Whistler’s parents had been close friends of Thomas John Chew and Abby Hortense (Hallam) Chew, the parents of Abby Hortense (Chew) Swift. Thomas John Chew (New Haven, CT 28 January 1777 – Brooklyn 21 July 1846) served in the U.S. Navy from 1790 to 1832. In 1809, he returned from furlough back to the Navy and was appointed purser on the John Adams. On 25 April 1812, he was commissioned purser on the USS Chesapeake. In May 1812, he became purser on the Constitution. On 1 June 1813, he supported in his arms the dying captain of the Chesapeake, James Lawrence, whose immortal last words, “Don’t give up the ship,” became the motto of the U.S. Navy. He was captured on board that ship by HMS Shannon on that day and released on 17 June 1813, going back to Boston. After the war, he served as purser on the Washington, sailing to the Mediterranean in May 1815 and returning in July 1818. He served at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until he resigned from the Navy in March 1832. In civilian life, he served for a time as president of the Protection Fire Insurance Company, assumedly in New York, and as treasurer of St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn from April 1833 to March 1837. He married in September 1813 Abby Hortense Hallam (New London, CT 13 September 1791 – New Brunswick, NJ 21 March 1874). They were both buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. While the Whistlers were in Russia, Anna Whistler recorded that on 17 July 1844 they received news of the Chews through a letter Abby Hortense (Chew) Swift wrote them. The letter was delivered by a young man brought out to their dacha by Colonel Charles Stewart Todd (see Image 278). The young man was Charles Collins Parker (see Image 319), a medical student traveling through Europe with Colonel Sylvanus Thayer (see Image 318), who had been superintendent of West Point when George Washington Whistler was a cadet there.

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Captain William Henry Swift14 (Taunton, MA 6 November 1800 – New York City 7 April 1879), was a classmate of Major George Washington Whistler in the Class of 1819 at the United States Military Academy. Between 1 July 1819 and 7 July 1838, he rose from the rank of second lieutenant, Corps of Artillery, to captain, Corps of Topographical Engineers. In 1821–1832, he served on Topographical Duty. From 1833 to 1843, he was an assistant in the Geodetic Survey of the Atlantic Coast of the United States. From 1833 to 1835, he was assistant on the survey of the Norwich (CT) and Worcester (MA) Railroad. In 1836, he was assistant on the survey of the entrance to the Connecticut River, and, in 1837, of Saybrook Harbor. In 1838–1839, he was in charge of improvement of rivers and harbors on Long Island Sound and from 1839 to 1844 on the New England Coast. In 1844 to 1849, the years when Major Whistler was in Russia, Captain William Henry Swift was principal assistant to Colonel Abert, chief of the Topographical Bureau in Washington, DC. In those same years, he worked on piers, lighthouses, and seawalls.

He resigned his commission in the U.S. Army on 31 July 1849. Before his resignation and in civilian life he was associated with the building of railroads. He was resident superintending engineer of the Western Railroad, from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Albany, New York, from 1836 to 1840. He was president of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois and Michigan Canal from 1845 to 1871, of the Hannibal and St. Joseph’s Railroad, Missouri, from 1856 to 1877, of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad from 1849 to 1851, and of the Western Railroad from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Albany, New York, from 1851 to 1854. In 1853, Harvard University conferred on him an honorary MA.

He is not referred to at all in Anna Whistler’s diaries, although in the 1840s he was, like his brother, Joseph Gardner Swift, guardian to George William Whistler, their nephew; handled Major Whistler’s financial affairs; was involved during the negotiations to persuade Major Whistler to accept the position as consulting engineer for the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway; received a diamond ring from the Russian government for his efforts; and married for the second time.15 His correspondence with Joseph Gardner Swift makes it clear that he was corresponding with Major Whistler.

His daughter, Mary (1826–1884) – by his first wife, Mary (Stewart) Swift (24 November 1801 – 18 November 1837) (married New London, CT 26 January 1825), daughter of the British consul, James Stewart, at New London, Connecticut – is mentioned in the diaries. Anna Whistler refers to this niece’s marriage to George Bromley Ironside (bap. 1828) on 26 March 1846, followed by a European honeymoon. During their honeymoon trip, Mary expected to see Deborah Delano Whistler, her first cousin, who was spending a year with the Winstanleys in Preston, Lancashire.

The Ironsides traveled “[part] of the way through great Britain” with the Bliss family of Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been the Whistlers’ neighbors and were making an eighteen-month tour of Europe. After the death of her mother in 1837, Mary (Swift) Ironside “had been substantially brought up” in the home of George Bliss (16 November 1793 – 19 April 1873) and Mary Shepherd (Dwight) Bliss (24 February 1801 – 12 April 1870).

There seemed to be some reservations on Captain Swift’s part about his daughter’s hasty marriage, perhaps because of the couple’s personalities. He wrote his brother, Gen. J.G. Swift: “[Mary] was a very jolly person. Her husband was a good deal of a stick.”

Captain William Henry Swift also had a son, Charles William (1828–1906), who is not mentioned in the diaries, but whose biography appears in Stoeckl, Howard, Swift, Ironside in this Appendix.

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Anna (McNeill) Whistler was the daughter of Dr. Daniel (North Carolina c. 1756 – Oak Forest, Bladen County, North Carolina 7 December 1828; see Image 23) and Martha (Kingsley) McNeill (see Image 22), his second wife. Her father is said to also have been known as Charles Donald McNeill “native of Bladen County, North Carolina [and] identified with Wilmington, North Carolina.” During the Revolution, his sympathies were with the British. In 1782, he appears in “the Army List as Supernumerary Surgeon’s Mate.” In the North Carolina State Reports, it is recorded that when the British arrived he “joined them and behaved himself … in unsupportable insolence.” He was consequently “tried and found guilty of [an unstated] charge, fined … and … required to depart the State within sixty days.” He refused to do this “until ultimately it was decided that the action of the judges was illegal.” It is not known whether these events were the cause of his decision to go north, where he continued practicing in Brooklyn as a doctor. He became a member (no. 746) of the St. Andrew’s Society in 1807. He moved permanently to New York with his family in 1815. He died in North Carolina while on a visit there.16

He is mentioned only once in the diaries: in June 1845. Anna Whistler, extolling the virtues of her half-sister, Alicia Margaret Caroline McNeill, says “How often this warm hearted sister brings my dear departed father before my minds eye!”

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Anna (McNeill) Whistler’s mother, Martha (Kingsley) McNeill (New Jersey 10 August 1775 – 7 April 1852; see Image 22),17 second wife of Dr. Daniel McNeill, was the daughter of Zephaniah Kingsley Sr. (Leake, Lancashire 11 April 1734 – Wilmington, NC c. 1792), a “third-generation Quaker,” and Isabella (Johnston) Kingsley (Fireside, Scotland c. 1737 – New York 14 December 1814) (buried in the Quakers’ Houston Street Cemetery in New York City). They were married by license at Bow Church, London, on 29 September 1763. The family moved to Charlestown, South Carolina, in December 1770. In 1791, they moved to Wilmington, North Carolina.

Martha (Kingsley) McNeill figures prominently in the diaries, chiefly in connection with her winter visits (1843–1847) to her son, Charles Johnston McNeill, in East Florida (see Images 58–60), from where she wrote to Anna (McNeill) Whistler.

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In addition to Anna (McNeill) Whistler, Dr. Daniel and Martha (Kingsley) McNeill had five other surviving children: Mary Charlotte (d. 27 October 1821), Isabella Kingsley (c. 1798 – c. 1850), William Gibbs (3 October 1801 – 16 February 1853; see Image 31), Charles Johnston (6 March 1802 – 2 March 1869), and Catherine Jane (c. 1812 – 20 May 1877).

William Gibbs McNeill, Charles Johnston McNeill, and Catherine Jane (McNeill) Palmer are referred to in the diaries as correspondents or mentioned in the letters of other family members. Mary Charlotte (McNeill) Easterbrook and Isabella Kingsley (McNeill) Fairfax do not appear in the diaries, but Isabella Kingsley (McNeill) Fairfax’s son, Donald McNeill Fairfax (10 March 1821 – 10 January 1894), does.

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Isabella Kingsley McNeill (c. 1798 – c. 1850)18 was married on 1 June 1816 at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn to George William Fairfax (Shannon Hill, Jefferson County, VA 5 November 1797 – June 1853) in a double-wedding ceremony with her sister, Mary Charlotte McNeill. George William Fairfax was the son of Ferdinando Fairfax (bap. 1 June 1769 – 24 September 1820) (whose godfather was George Washington) and Elizabeth Blair Cary. The Fairfaxes had four surviving children: Martha (b. Shannon Hill, Jefferson County, VA c. 1820), called “Matty,” who married Isaiah Davenport; Donald McNeill (Mount Eagle, Fairfax County, VA 10 March 1821 – Hagerstown MD 10 January 1894); Isabella Kingsley (born Shannon Hill, Jefferson County, VA c. 1822); and Edwina Cary.

Of this family, only Donald McNeill Fairfax (see Image 38) is mentioned in the diaries. He entered the Navy as midshipman from North Carolina 12 August 1837. He cruised around the world on the flagship Columbia in 1838–1840. He was attached to the Fairfield and the Brandywine in the Mediterranean in 1841–1842. In 1844, when Anna Whistler mentions him, he was a “passed” midshipman (1843). He had escaped death when the Missouri was destroyed by fire in Gibraltar Harbor on 26 August 1843, while Anna Whistler was on her way to St. Petersburg. The accident on the man-of-war SS Princeton on 28 February 1844 is referred to by Anna Whistler, who presumed correctly that this nephew, for whom she had great affection, was a member of the crew. He took part in the capture of Lower California during the Mexican War. He was commandant of midshipmen at Annapolis in 1864–1865. He was promoted to Commodore in 1873. He was for five years after that commandant of the naval station at New London, Connecticut. He was promoted in 1880 to rear-admiral and retired, at his own request, in September 1881. His first wife was Virginia Cary Ragland (d. 1878), whom he married on 5 June 1854. Anna Whistler lived with them for a time, and she and Virginia (Ragland) Fairfax came to detest one another. His second wife was a widow, Josephine (Foote) Reese (28 June 1837 – 25 May 1918), daughter of Rear-Admiral Andrew Hull Foote (1806–1863), whom he married in 1879.

* * *

Mary Charlotte McNeill (drowned at sea 27 October 1821), married on 1 June 1816 at St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn, Lt. Joseph Easterbrook (Bristol bap. 6 November 1794 – drowned at sea 27 October 1821) of the British Navy.19 It was a double-wedding ceremony with her sister, Isabella Kingsley McNeill (c. 1798 – c. 1850).

Lt. Joseph Easterbrook was the eldest of the four children of Joseph Easterbrook (30 June 1767 – 10 January 1810), a tobacconist, and Mary (Nott) Easterbrook (b. c. 1765). His parents were married on 18 July 1788 in Tiverton. His siblings were Mary (21 December 1790 – Wadebridge, Cornwall 17 December 1862), who did not marry; Elizabeth (bap. 6 November 1794 – Bristol 18 August 1832), who married Joseph Smith, undertaker, on 9 January 1813 in Bristol and had seven children; and William (12 July 1795 – Tiverton 8 February 1876), ironmonger, who did not marry.

Lt. Joseph Easterbrook’s parents had an unusual marital situation for that time: they were divorced in 1797 with Joseph obtaining custody of the children. In his will, dated 9 July 1796, Joseph Easterbrook Sr. described his wife as “late Mary Nott, Spinster and who has lately eloped from me with another man.” As a consequence of the affair that Mary (Nott) Easterbrook engaged in in 1795, a divorce case was brought before the Episcopal Consistory Court of Bristol in 1797. The deponents unequivocally supported Joseph Easterbrook Sr., who was eventually granted a divorce with custody of his children.

Lt. Joseph Easterbrook and Mary Charlotte (McNeill) Easterbrook had two children. They were under five years of age when they died. It has not been possible to ascertain their names, birth places, or dates of birth.

While sailing on the ship Sea Fox (Capt. Wyer), from New York on Saturday, 27 October 1821, bound for Port-au-Prince, all four family members met their death by drowning when the ship “was capsized that same night, about 63 miles north-east of Sandy-hook” “by a sudden squall [and] the dead lights not being in, the water rushed with great violence into the cabin windows, which filled it instantly.” Mary (McNeill) Easterbrook’s father, Dr. Daniel McNeill, wrote to the Easterbrook family in Bristol, informing them of the tragedy.

Although the Easterbrooks do not figure in the diaries, their biography is included in this essay because very little was heretofore known of them.

* * * * *

William Gibbs McNeill (Wilmington, NC 3 October 1801 – Brooklyn 16 February 1853; see Image 31)20 was intended for the clergy and had actually begun his education for that profession, when he indicated his interest in a military career. Through the influence of his friend, General Joseph Gardner Swift (see Image 11), he was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he entered in July 1814. Here, he met George Washington Whistler and William H. Swift, who became his lifelong friends. He graduated on 28 July 1817, on the day Major Sylvanus Thayer (see Image 318) became superintendent of the Military Academy. Between his graduation in 1817 and his resignation from the United States Army in 1837, he advanced from the rank of third lieutenant, Corps of Artillery, to brevet major, Staff-Topographical Engineers in 1834.

In 1824–1826, he served on the survey of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal; in 1827 on the survey of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), and in 1827–1830 as a member of the Board of Civil Engineers for the construction of the Road. In November 1828, he was sent, along with George Washington Whistler, Ross Winans (see Image 228), and Jonathan Knight (chief engineer of the B&O, 1829–1842), by the B&O Company, to study the railroad system in Great Britain. In about 1839, he served on the survey of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad, of which he was the chief engineer from 1830 to 1836; in 1831, on the survey of the Paterson and Hudson River Railroad, New Jersey, of which he was the chief engineer from 1831 to 1834; in 1832–1833, on the survey of the Boston and Providence Railroad, of which he was chief engineer in 1832–1835; in 1836–1837, as chief engineer of the Western Railroad in Massachusetts; and was involved in the examination of the coasts of North and South Carolina in 1837.

As a civil engineer, he was chief engineer of the Western Railroad in Massachusetts from Worcester to Albany from 1836 to 1840; chief engineer of the State of Georgia in 1837; chief engineer of the Charleston, South Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, projected railroad from 1837 to 1840; president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1842–1843; and consulting engineer of various railroads and other public works in the United States and Cuba in 1850–1853.

In 1842, when the “Dorr Rebellion” in Rhode Island broke out, he was commissioned major-general in the State Militia and made leader of the “law and order party.” This appointment had lasting effects for his subsequent career. The rebellion was bloodless and over in three days. In 1844, he was appointed chief engineer of the Dry Docks at the Brooklyn Naval Yard by President Tyler, but removed from office in 1845 by President Polk (see Image 50) because of the hostility of Dorr adherents to him. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, the continuing Dorr influence successfully impeded McNeill’s attempt to be appointed a brigadier-general in the U.S. Army. It was his militia rank that caused him to be referred to as “General McNeill.”

In 1851, he visited Europe and in London in May 1852 was elected the first American member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. In February 1853, he died in Brooklyn.

William Gibbs McNeill, like his sister Anna (McNeill) Whistler, had the McNeill temper. He was an alcoholic and an extremely difficult person, as the biography of his nephew George William Whistler in “The Whistlers as They Were in the 1840s” shows. It is recorded in the diaries that he wrote Major Whistler a letter in early 1844 that pleased Anna Whistler, because it revealed the cheerful, confiding, and affectionate side of him.

He married on 7 June 1821 in Newark, New Jersey, Maria Matilda Cammann (bap. New York 1799 – 29 December 1850).21 She was the daughter of Charles Louis Cammann (Loxdedt, Kingdom of Hanover 25 September 1759 – 5 December 1805), who emigrated “to America in 1787” and “became a leading merchant in New York.” Her mother was Maria Margaretta (Oswald) Cammann (New York 13 January 1774 – Brooklyn 15 April 1862), daughter of Philip Jacob Oswald and Catherine (Hahn, later changed to Hone) Oswald. They were married in 1791 and lived in Greenwich Village. At the death of her husband, Maria Margaretta (Oswald) Cammann was left with seven children. In 1813, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey. In 1826, they came back to live in New York.

Of Maria Matilda Cammann’s six siblings, the families of two are mentioned in the diaries: her brothers, George P. Cammann and Henry J. Cammann. George P. Cammann22 (Greenwich Village 1 September 1804 – Fordham, NY 14 February 1863; see Image 41) entered Columbia College in 1821 at the age of seventeen and graduated in 1825. He then proceeded to train as a physician in Newark and New York. In 1828, he went to Paris for further study, returning to New York in 1830. In 1833, he married Anna Catherine Lorillard (23 October 1809 – 22 December 1896), daughter of Jacob Lorillard (22 May 1774 – 20 September 1838) and Margaretta (Kunze) Lorillard (16 August 1791 – 23 November 1846; see Image 53). It is the death of Margaretta (Kunze) Lorillard that is communicated to Anna Whistler in St. Petersburg by her sister-in-law, Maria Matilda (Cammann) McNeill, and is recorded in her diary for 1846. Maria’s source for this information was probably her brother, George, and/or her sister-in-law, Anna Catherine (Lorillard) Cammann.

The biography of Maria (Cammann) McNeill’s brother, Henry J. Cammann, is taken up in the section on Dunscombe and Vallance in this essay.

Anna Whistler was very close to Maria (Cammann) McNeill and corresponded with her regularly while in St. Petersburg. This sister-in-law, who suffered poor health, supplied Anna Whistler with information about her own family and about the Palmers in Stonington, where the William Gibbs McNeill family frequently visited.

* * *

William Gibbs McNeill and Maria Matilda (Cammann) McNeill had five children who survived beyond the 1840s: Mary Isabella (19 August 1823 – 24 October 1867; see Image 32), Catherine Julia (26 December 1825 – 20 October 1897; see Image 33), Eliza Winstanley (1830–1855), William Wyatt (October 1833 – 4 June 1853), and Patrick Tracy Jackson (3 October 1835 – 22 April 1898). All of them are mentioned in the diaries. Also mentioned there are Louisa (1832 – Ash Wednesday 1840) and Henry Cammann (1 March 1828 – 7 August 1840), who died as children, she of an illness and he by drowning. As the anniversary of each of their deaths approached or occurred, Anna Whistler focused her thoughts on them. Such remembrance of them, for example, is recorded in the diaries in the entry for Thursday [Sept.] 26th, 1844, on the eve of the first anniversary of two-year-old Charles Donald’s death, when Anna Whistler and her half-sister, Alicia Margaret Caroline McNeill, discussed all the departed children.

* * *

Mary Isabella McNeill (19 August 1823 – 24 October 1867; see Image 32)23 was being courted in the late 1840s by Johann Friedrich Rodewald (Bremen 21 July 1808 – Rettershof 4 October 1886), called Frederick outside his parents’ family. They married on 2 April 1850 and had seven children.

Frederick was the oldest of seven sons of Johann Friedrich Arnold Rodewald, and inherited his father’s business acumen. After leaving Bremen, he spent a brief time in London and then established himself in New Orleans, where he became very wealthy in a short time. In New Orleans, he was also consul for Bremen. He later established himself in London, mainly in banking. He was totally autocratic in nature and even into old age brooked no opposition to his word and opinion. He was small in stature and thickset; his facial features were sharp, and his eyes piercing. On the whole, while he had much personal grace, he presented a harsh figure. His wife predeceased him. He often spent the summer months in his last years in Taunus, at Rettershof, an estate he had given to his daughter, Alice (Rodewald) von Diskau. He died there and was buried in Norwood near London.

Mary Isabella is mentioned in the diaries as being present during the interment of two-year-old Charles Donald Whistler in Stonington; as resembling Miss Maude, whose portrait hung in the Winstanley home; and as a correspondent of Anna Whistler in 1844.

* * *

Catherine Julia McNeill (Newark, NJ 26 December 1825 – Staten Island, NY 20 October 1897; see Image 33)24 was being courted in the late 1840s by Adolf Rodewald (Bremen 24 November 1818 – Staten Island, New York 27 March 1869). They married on 6 December 1849 in New York and had four sons and four daughters. Known by various forms of the name Julia, she was a faithful correspondent of her first cousin, Deborah Delano Whistler, whose receipt of letters from her was often recorded by Anna Whistler in the diaries. Anna Whistler was frequently also permitted to read Julia’s letters. The two girls were called “twins” because both were born in the same year: 1825. A businessman, Adolf Rodewald established himself in New York with the help of his oldest brother, Frederick. In comparison to his brothers, he was prone to speculation to the extent that when he died his brothers thought they would have to support his wife and children. But a few months later his investments paid off, leaving his family with a considerable fortune. He was musical and extremely well read, especially in history and chemistry.

* * *

Little is known also of Eliza Winstanley McNeill (1830 – Brooklyn 22 May 1855).25 She was thirteen years old when Anna Whistler went to St. Petersburg and eighteen when the diaries were brought to a close. She married on 24 September 1851 in Grace Church, Brooklyn, Rev. Edward Octavius Flagg (Georgetown, SC 13 December 1824 – New Haven, CT 23 August 1911), who was then rector of Trinity Church, Norwich, Connecticut. Her husband was a poet and lecturer as well as a clergyman. They had a son named William McNeill Flagg (1852–1856), who died a year after his mother. Anna Whistler mentions in her diaries receiving a letter from Eliza Winstanley McNeill in May 1846, when the latter was sixteen, describing the McNeills’ new home in Irving Place, New York City, and asking Anna Whistler to come to New York for the summer to meet her Aunt Eliza Cammann from Newfoundland. Anna Whistler recorded that she, in turn, wrote a note to Eliza, including it in a letter to Catherine Jane (McNeill) Palmer.

* * *

William Wyatt McNeill26 (October 1833 – 4 June 1853) was named for the Rev. William Edward Wyatt (1789–1864) of Baltimore, Maryland. He was ten years old when Anna Whistler commenced her diary in November 1843. By the time of her abrupt abandoning of it in September 1848, he was almost fourteen years old. His appearances in the diaries are limited to information about his health. Thus, in the entry of Saturday [May] 3rd [1845], Anna Whistler records that exactly a week before (April 27) she received a letter from Martha (Kingsley) McNeill saying that Willie Wyatt had been extremely ill and was now convalescent. She also records that James and Willie Whistler missed him greatly. With the marriage on 2 April 1850 of his sister, Mary Isabella, to Frederick Rodewald (Bremen 21 July 1808 – Rettershof 4 October 1886), William Wyatt received employment in his brother-in-law’s firm in New Orleans. He died in that city on 4 June 1853 as a result of being struck by the shaft of a streetcar.

* * *

Patrick Tracy Jackson McNeill (3 October 1835 – 22 April 1898)27 was named for Patrick Tracy Jackson (14 August 1780 – 12 September 1847), a Boston merchant, who dealt in goods from the East and West Indies. He was about eight years old when Anna Whistler and her children went to St. Petersburg in 1843 and almost thirteen when the diaries came to a halt. He was called “Jacks” and “Jacky,” and is mentioned in the diaries as a playmate whom James and Willie missed greatly. In 1855, he was working for the Winanses in Baltimore. By 1867, he was working in Glasgow, Missouri. He married Sara Lewis, with whom he had six children. By 1878, they were living in San Francisco.

* * *

Charles Johnston McNeill (Wilmington, NC 6 March 1802 – Florida 2 March 1869) was named for his maternal grandmother’s brother, Charles Johnston (1732–1804), a South Carolina merchant who had paid to set up his brother-in-law, Zephaniah Kingsley Sr., as a merchant in Charleston. Charles Johnston McNeill lived at Reddys Point in East Florida, where he was employed by Zephaniah Kingsley, his mother’s brother.28 He was a hunchback, having been dropped by a servant when he was a baby.29 In late 1838, when Zephaniah Kingsley began, from “his old residence at Fort George Island” (see Images 58–60), “to organize a large-scale emigration of free persons of color to Haiti,” he hired this nephew to be “overseer at Fort George.”30 In his will, filed on 20 July 1843, Zephaniah Kingsley left Charles Johnston McNeill “62½ acres at Beauclerc Bluff in Duval County, 300 acres ‘at the head of six mile creek (Saw Mill Creek)’ in St. Johns County, a ‘negro woman Betsey[,] Peggy the daughter of Nancy and all their children and issue’, and a horse and saddle.”31

After the death of Zephaniah Kingsley (1843), Martha (Kingsley) McNeill, as predicted by her brother a relative would do, challenged his will and its designated heirs (October 1844). The grounds she gave for her challenge was that Zephaniah’s wife, Anna Kingsley, was “a negress,” and his children with her and other black women, not his wives, were “mulattoes and each a slave of Zephaniah Kingsley” and “legally classified as ‘coloured’ and were therefore barred from inheriting property.”32

In her court petition, Anna Kingsley insisted that Charles Johnston McNeill, who was now overseer at his first cousin, George Kingsley’s, San Jose plantation, be dismissed. He was replaced, but it is not known whether he was dismissed or resigned.33 On 2 March 1846, the court “upheld the validity of Kingsley’s 1843 will.”34 Martha McNeill’s further “appeals to Florida’s higher courts … also failed.”35

Charles Johnston McNeill was living at Reddys Point, which was “a small farm [350 acres] in Arlington that [he had] purchased from the Kingsley estate for $200.”36 It had been Zephaniah “Kingsley’s well-known policy” not to separate slave families, and Charles Johnston McNeill violated that policy with regard to Reddys Point, but in 1848 reunited the family he had separated. He was said to have “had trouble with the Negroes after Mr. Kingsley’s death,”37 but, like other relatives of Zephaniah Kingsley, honored the latter’s “commitments to self-purchase of freedom, liberal emancipation policies, and the sanctity of slave families.”38 It is interesting that, like his brother, William Gibbs McNeill, and sister, Anna (McNeill) Whistler, Charles had the very excitable McNeill temperament, which sometimes flared up in relationships with his slaves. By 1860, Charles Johnston McNeill’s slaves no longer numbered sixteen, as they had in the 1840s. He “owned one slave, a sixty-year-old woman.”39 It is pointed out by Zephaniah Kingsley’s biographer that his “heirs and legatees who lived in Duval County in the 1850s” were together responsible for the creation of a free colored community in their rural enclave east of the St. Johns River; were, like him, “proslavery and believed in the need for financial security to protect against the uncertainty of life in turbulent times”; given “a decade of intense race hysteria and discrimination toward free persons of color, and with their eyes fixed on the possibility of a war between the free and slave states,” they “traded human property for money.”40 However, he had financial problems, and in April 1850 Anna Whistler tried to negotiate a loan for him from Joseph Harrison Jr., but Andrew McCalla Eastwick, whom she asked to act as go-between, himself made the loan.41

Charles Johnston McNeill married a mulatto woman named Elizabeth Coffee (St. Augustine, FL c. 1828 – Jacksonville FL 23 August 1898).42 They had nine children: Donald C. (Florida c. 1845–1876); Josiah S. (b. Florida c. 1847); Charles W. (Jacksonville, FL 27 October 1847 – Port Washington, Nassau County, New York 16 June 1933; buried Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, Kings County [Brooklyn] NY), who married Fanny Stevenson; Albert/Alvan Clifton (Jacksonville, FL 1853 – Jacksonville, FL 1933), who married Anne Louise Christopher (1853 – Jacksonville, FL 1918); Ellen M. (b. Florida c. 1855), called “Tante”; William Palmer (Florida 15 April 1857 – Bronx, NY 27 September 1947), who married Nealie McNeal; Anna Alicia (Florida c. 1859 – Pinellas, FL 1950), who married on 19 June 1876 Alvan van Buskirk (1847–1916); Pearl Eliza (Florida 28 January 1860 – c. 1878); and James Bolton (1864 – Boston, MA 1 November 1899).43 He came north for visits, sometimes with his sons, but his wife did not accompany him. Long after his death, Donald Palmer Stanton, the son of his niece, Anna Whistler (Palmer) Stanton, informed Kate McDiarmid, the biographer of Anna (McNeill) Whistler, that Uncle Charlie’s sons were very dark, and that Anna Whistler (Palmer) Stanton “suspected ‘dark’ blood.”44

It is not until March and May 1858 that we learn details of Charles Johnston McNeill’s life, when Anna Whistler spent a month at his home. As early as 1829 and up until her death in 1852, Martha (Kingsley) McNeill spent winters (some extending into summer) in Florida with Charles Johnston McNeill. In the autumn of 1846, when she was considering going to live with the Whistlers until they left Russia permanently, her son traveled north and successfully persuaded her instead to accompany him when he returned to Florida. She admirably tutored Eliza (Coffee) McNeill in social behaviour and engaged in the religious and moral training of this daughter-in-law and of the grandchildren.

Six years after their mother’s death, Anna Whistler visited her brother for the first time and was impressed by what their mother had achieved in her years of spending winters with him and his family: “I really must commend the mother of his promising sons for training them so gently & firmly to do right. I have been chaplain as regularly as teacher & trust she will never omit family worship. My mothers lessons are impressed upon Uncle Charlies wife she was a poor girl and motherless, my mother taught her & now she acquits herself really as a lady.” While this visit “awakened individual interest in his family,” and she concentrated on tutoring his three eldest sons, she did not plan to come again, although he asked her “to repeat her visit every winter.” She took no leisure hours for herself while with him, and was rewarded after her departure by letters from him that were “the outpouring of grateful affection for what my interest in the improvement of his boys accomplished.”45 She did not, however, wish to live in the South for reasons she did not give.46

She described her brother’s log house as “neatly kept tho so – barely furnished” with “Oleanders 20 feet high” surrounding the house’s enclosure, Cape Jasmines, ripening orange trees, berries, and peaches. The house had a piazza from which she preferred “inhaling the sea breezes … looking down upon the St. Johns two miles wide” rather than sailing. They occasionally had “oysters and fine fresh fish,” but as it was planting season, he and “the small band of field hands [were] in requisition.” When he reappeared after work in the fields, “he always appear[ed] the gentleman.”47

He was one of the beneficiaries of his half-sister, Alicia Margaret Caroline McNeill’s, will in 1863, receiving £200.48

In 1867, he, his wife, and six children were able to move out of the “negro house [they] had been obliged to live in when the one they were in was burned!” and to resettle “in their own at Readys Point … from which they had been banished.”49

Anna Whistler pointed out that “he is so true hearted; his only boast being that his father was an honest man! And so my brothers popularity does not ensnare him, his taste for literature leads him to keeping up with the times & their changes, agriculture is his pursuit and he informs himself of the improvements.”50

Charles Johnston McNeill is mentioned only once in the diaries, when he is recorded as having traveled to New York and Stonington with his Florida cousins in the summer of 1844. Otherwise, he is referred to only obliquely through Martha (Kingsley) McNeill’s letters to Anna Whistler, and even then it is his plantation, or, rather, the blooming of the flowers there, that is the subject of Anna Whistler’s comments. She tended generally not to divulge whatever their mother might have revealed of his situation. On 29 May 1844, she received a letter from Martha (Kingsley) McNeill and said of its contents only that her mother’s voice was always a true comfort to her.

He died suddenly on 2 March 1869 at his home. Writing to James H. Gamble and his wife, Harriet, on 6 May 1869, Anna Whistler continued to praise him: “A fortnight since came to me from Florida tidings of my brothers sudden death, for which however I am thankful in feeling assured he was prepared. his was a life of cheerful resignation to our heavenly Fathers will, diligent in his labors for the maintenance of his wife & many children, he was fervent in spirit. I may truly say he walked with God & is not for God has taken him!”51 Two of his sons, Donald and Charles, attended a service in Stonington, Connecticut, for their father. An interesting account of the service was made to Anna Whistler by her sister, Catherine Jane (McNeill) Palmer,52 but, unfortunately, that letter is not extant.

* * *

Anna (McNeill) Whistler’s youngest sister, Catherine Jane (“Kate”) McNeill (1812 – Stonington, CT 20 May 1877), married on 23 March 1840 at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, as his second wife, George Edwin Palmer, MD53 (Stonington, CT 15 April 1803 – Stonington, CT 8 May 1868; see Image 36). Dr. Palmer already had three surviving children from his first marriage to Emma Ann (Woodbridge) Palmer (Stonington, CT 28 February 1802 – Stonington, CT 16 February 1839): Amos (Stonington, CT 18 February 1827 – Providence, RI 4 June 1861), William Rhodes (Stonington, CT 9 September 1828 – Manhattan, NY 8 April 1893), and Emma Woodbridge (Stonington, CT 24 November 1835 – Stonington, CT 28 July 1912). There seems to have also been a second daughter, Julia Palmer, born in 1839, the year of her mother’s death. Of these children, only Emma Woodbridge Palmer is mentioned in the diaries. She wrote Anna Whistler a letter in May or June 1844. Amos Palmer became a physician. Their mother was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Connecticut. Dr. George Edwin Palmer’s funeral in 1868 was observed with full Masonic rites and attended by five hundred people.

George Edwin Palmer, MD, had four children with Catherine Ann (“Kate”) (McNeill) Palmer: Julia McNeill (Stonington, CT 25 March 1841 – New York City 22 February 1902), George Edwin Jr. (Stonington, CT 8 May 1843 – Cincinnati, OH 24 May 1909), Donald McNeill (Stonington, CT 7 November 1845 – San Jose, CA 9 May 1928), and Anna Whistler (Stonington, CT 7 April 1848 – Stonington, CT 28 May 1928).

Anna Whistler was very close to her sister. They corresponded on a regular basis while the Whistlers were in Russia and Anna Whistler wrote frequently in her diaries of the receipt of letters from Catherine Jane with news of the birth of the latter’s children, of life in Stonington, and the burial of two-year-old Charles Donald Whistler. Anna Whistler also recorded that her brother-in-law, Dr. George Edwin Palmer, who sometimes added a PS to his wife’s letters, supplied her with medications for the journey to St. Petersburg and spoke of him with great affection.

The Palmer Home, called “The Old Corner House” (see Image 37), was located at 24 Main Street in Stonington.

* * *

Julia McNeill Palmer (Stonington, CT 25 March 1841 – New York 22 February 1902) was the first child and first daughter of Catherine Jane (McNeill) and Dr. George Edwin Palmer.54 She married on 27 December 1870, in Calvary Church, Stonington, Connecticut, the Rev. William Slosson Boardman (New York City 17 June 1838 – Sienna, Italy 27 January 1923). They traveled extensively in Europe for the ten years before her death and always made their home at the Park Avenue Hotel in New York City (between 32nd and 33rd Streets) because it was thought to be fireproof. On Saturday, 22 February 1902, a fire broke out in the hotel. Julia McNeill (Palmer) Boardman perished in the fire, dying a horrible death. She could not at first be found in any hospital, but eventually some remains from the hotel were identified by a niece, who recognized a piece of jewelry she was wearing. Her funeral was held in New York, and her remains buried in Stonington, Connecticut. Her husband was badly burned but recovered. He remarried the following year.

She was about two and a half years old when Anna Whistler and her family went to St. Petersburg in 1843 and about seven and a half when the diaries came to a halt. In March 1844, Anna Whistler recorded buying a Russian “nurse” doll for her, made by a Russian lady in reduced circumstances.

* * *

George Edwin Palmer Jr. (Stonington, CT 8 May 1843 – Cincinnati, OH 24 May 1909)55 was about three months old when Anna Whistler and her children departed for St. Petersburg in September 1843 and about five years old when the diaries ended. The diaries show that his mother gratified Anna Whistler when she wrote her in the winter of 1845 that everyone who saw her little Georgie was reminded of the deceased two-year-old Charles Donald Whistler. The thrilling details of an illness suffered by him are recorded in the diaries related to Anna Whistler in a letter from her sister-in-law Maria (Cammann) McNeill, who frequently visited Stonington with her family. George Edwin Palmer Jr. married Susan Euphemia Sears.

* * *

Donald McNeill Palmer (Stonington, CT 7 November 1845 – San Jose, CA 9 May 1928)56 was born in November 1845. He is not mentioned in the diaries. Although the diary for 1845 includes November, Anna Whistler expressed in December 1845 or the early months of 1846 her irritation at being unable to record events except sporadically. He married Ann Elizabeth Feazel of Glasgow, Maine (b. c. 1847). They had a daughter, Lillian McNeill Palmer (6 July 1871 – Los Gatos, CA 1961), who became an artist in the Arts and Crafts Movement (1890–1920).

* * *

Anna Whistler Palmer (Stonington, CT 7 April 1848 – Stonington, CT 28 May 1928)57 was five months old when the diaries came to a halt in September 1848. She came to dislike her Aunt Anna Whistler because of recollections of confiscated toy episodes when she was a young child and of Anna Whistler’s humiliation of her as a teenager. She married on 17 November 1875 Dr. George Dallas Stanton, MD, of Stonington, Connecticut, and had one child, Donald Palmer Stanton (7 October 1876 – 27 November 1932), who remained a bachelor. Her dislike of her aunt was disclosed when her son communicated it in 1928 and 1930 to Kate McDiarmid, who was collecting information for her biography of Anna Whistler. Her birth is mentioned in the diaries in 1848. The 1848 diary is not resumed until April 25, two weeks after her birth, and on 22 May Anna Whistler records the receipt of an affectionate letter written by her sister, Kate, just before the latter’s confinement, with a PS from her husband, Dr. George Edwin Palmer, for whom Anna Whistler had great affection.

* * * * *

Also among Anna Whistler’s Florida relatives58 mentioned in the diaries are the children of her mother’s sister, Isabella (Kingsley) Gibbs (13 January 1774 – 21 January 1838), who were visiting in New York and Stonington, Connecticut, in the autumn of 1844 along with her brother, Charles Johnston McNeill. They are Kingsley Beatty Gibbs (25 July 1810 – 16 October 1859) and Sophia Hermes (Gibbs) Couper (7 November 1812 – 20 March 1903). The second wife of Kingsley Beatty Gibbs, Laura (Williams) Gibbs (1820–1892; married 14 January 1841), was also present.

Kingsley Beatty Gibbs, like his first cousin, Charles Johnston McNeill, worked for their uncle, Zephaniah Kingsley (1765–1843), in East Florida. At the latter’s death, he and Charles Johnston McNeill both received bequests. “Kingsley Beatty Gibbs received the schooner North Carolina and 1,000 acres of land at Twelve Mile Swamp in St. John’s County.”

Sophia Hermes (Gibbs) Couper, who had married John Couper (St. Simons Island, Glynn County, GA 12 April 1799 – West Bay [near Mobile], AL 24 January 1837) in Chatham, Georgia, on 21 November 1832, was a widow. On 5 February 1846, Sophia Hermes (Gibbs) Couper of Wilmington, North Carolina, married at Fort George Island, Florida, as her second husband, General Duncan Lamont Clinch (Edgecombe County, NC 6 April 1787 – Macon, Bibb County, GA 27 November 1849).

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South Carolina cousins59 are also mentioned briefly in the diaries. Anna Whistler refers to Miss Anna Johnstone, and Miss Johnstone’s niece, Mrs. Corbett, as well as Mrs. Corbett’s daughter, Lizzie. Anna Johnstone (1787–1870), first cousin of Martha (Kingsley) McNeill, was the daughter of Charles Johnston and Mary (Mackenzie) Johnston, brother and sister-in-law of Isabella (Johnston) Kingsley. Anna Johnstone lived at South Bay, Charleston, South Carolina, where Anna Whistler visited her in 1858, after a twenty-nine–year hiatus. Of Anna Johnstone’s six siblings, Marion, who married Peter Porcher Jr., was the mother of Margaret (Porcher) Corbett (b. 1804). The latter, “widowed at age twenty-five,” was the mother of one child, Elizabeth, who married Polydore P. Duclos, a broker, and lived in New York. In the 1860s, their address was 106 East 41st Street. When Anna Whistler came to the United States from England for a visit in the summer of 1867, she frequently saw these relatives in New York, even living with Anna Johnstone in the home of the vacationing Elizabeth (Corbett) Duclos and providing care for her.

In the diaries, Anna Whistler says that the manner of her guest, Miss Krehmer, reminds her of her Charleston cousins.

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Also appearing in the diaries are members of the Dunscombe and Vallance60 families, whose tie to Anna Whistler is through Maria (Cammann) McNeill, her sister-in-law. They were the children of John Dunscombe (Bermuda 1777 – Liverpool 28 November 1848) and Elizabeth (McGill or Magill) Dunscombe (Middletown, CT 18 July 1779 – 28 February 1830): Eliza Dunscombe (Bermuda 1801 – Brooklyn 11 July 1861), Margaret Magill Dunscombe (St. John’s, NL c. 1807 – buried West Derby, Liverpool, Lancashire 18 July 1851), and George Hoyles Dunscombe (St. John’s, NL 30 August 1817 – Florida 21 March 1871). Their father was a merchant in Bermuda and came to Newfoundland in 1808 as an agent for a group of Bermuda businessmen. He eventually became a very prominent citizen there. St. John’s, Newfoundland, is named for his Bermuda home, St. John’s Hill. His business was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1846 (June).

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Eliza M. Dunscombe married at Albany, New York, on 23 September 1831 Henry J. Cammann (d. 1833), a lawyer and the brother of Maria (Cammann) McNeill. He died about eighteen months later, and Eliza (Dunscombe) Cammann spent most of the rest of her widowed life in England.

On 1 May 1846, Anna Whistler recorded in the diaries that she had received a letter from her niece, Eliza McNeill, saying that Aunt Eliza was coming from Newfoundland that summer to New York. Eliza McNeill wished Anna Whistler to come from Russia to the United States to meet her.

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Margaret Magill Dunscombe married on 24 July 1830 at St. John’s, Newfoundland, William Vallance (Newton Abbot, Devon c. 1797 – Liverpool 23 April 1863). The Vallance family were merchants and ship owners of London, Liverpool, and (in Devon) Dartmouth, Torquay, and Teignmouth. The William Vallance family lived at 1 or 2 West Derby Street, Liverpool. William Vallance is listed in Liverpool directories at 2 West Derby Street as merchant and agent to the Medical, Legal, and General Life Assurance Company.

The Vallances had at least ten children: Mary Eliza (St. John’s, NL 16 May 1831 – d. possibly in New Zealand), probably the eldest daughter “Minnie” referred to by Anna Whistler in her diaries; John Dunscombe (b. Shaldon, Devon c. 1833; bap. 3 September 1833); William (b. c. 1835); George Dunscombe (b. Newton Abbot, Devon July 1838); Margaret Ellen (b. c. 1840; bap. St. Mary, Edge Hill, Lancashire 24 August 1840; probably died, as there is a second Margaret later); Christopher Bridge (b. Liverpool, 23 July 1841; bap. St. Mary, Edge Hill, Lancashire 25 January 1842); Margaret Jane (b. Liverpool c. 1842; bap. St. Bartholomew’s, Liverpool, Lancashire 18 December 1842); Frederick Julian (b. Liverpool c. 1844; bap. St. Bartholomew’s, Liverpool, Lancashire 23 September 1844); Miriam Lois (b. Liverpool 16 April 1848; bap. St. Jude’s, West Derby, Lancashire 12 November 1848 – Greenland, New Zealand 24 June 1933); Rhoda Ellen (b. Liverpool c. 1850).

In 1847, when Anna Whistler, James, and Willie were in England, six or seven of the Vallance children could have been with their parents. Rhoda Ellen was not yet born. Possibly William had died, as also may have Margaret Ellen, since there was now a Margaret Jane.

Mary Eliza (“Minnie”) Dunscombe became a nurse and married James O’Shea on 25 February 1868 in Wellington, New Zealand. Of the younger children referred to in the diaries whom Anna Whistler could have seen in Liverpool, John joined the British Army either in the East Indies or in India, and Miriam Lois married on 18 April 1876 in Wellington, New Zealand, Charles Joseph Barker, who worked variously as banker, collector, and government insurance agent in Carterton and Christchurch, New Zealand.

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Eliza (Dunscombe) Cammann and Margaret McGill (Dunscombe) Vallance’s brother, George Hoyles, was a banker in Coburg, Ontario, Canada. He eventually moved to New York, while his partner, Eugenius Harvey of Bermuda, took over their company, Dunscombe and Harvey, in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He married when he was over fifty and died in 1871 in Florida. He was buried in Hibernia Cemetery in Orange Park, Clay County, Florida. His wife’s name is not known. After his death, his wife returned to Canada. They had two surviving children: George Hoyles Dunscombe Jr. (c. 1867 – after 1906) and Catherine (Dunscombe) Colt, born after her father’s death. As his sister, Eliza, was Maria (Cammann) McNeill’s sister-in-law, he would have been able to bring Anna Whistler news, directly or indirectly, of her brother, William Gibbs McNeill’s, family, when he came to Liverpool in the summer of 1847.

A nephew, Cyprian Bridge, remembers his aunts Eliza and Margaret as strikingly beautiful women and his uncle George as the handsomest man he ever saw and an extraordinary fisherman.

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Anna Whistler also mentions in her diaries a “Henriet Halback,”61 whose tie to Anna Whistler is also through Maria (Cammann) McNeill, and who wrote her a letter from Frankfort am Main that was received in St. Petersburg on 22 April 1848. An old friend of Anna Whistler’s, Henriette Wilhelmine (Bohlen) Halbach (Philadelphia 15 September 1803 – Baden-Baden 14 March 1870) was the daughter of Bohl Bohlen (Schiffdorf [near Bremerhaven] 26 September 1754 – Philadelphia 11 September 1836) and Johanna Magdalena Oswald (New York 1 August 1770 – Amsterdam 13 February 1805). Her father was a gin merchant and the Dutch consul in Philadelphia.

Henriette Wilhelmine Bohlen married on 18 March 1826 in Philadelphia George Halbach (Müngsten bei Remscheid 4 October 1798 – Baden-Baden 27 August 1855). They had five children: Oswald (Philadelphia 27 February 1827 – Philadelphia 29 April 1930); Alwine Henriette (Philadelphia 6 March 1829 – Madrid 16 April 1890); Emilie Georgiana (Philadelphia 20 March 1831 – Philadelphia 17 August 1834); Juliet Amanda Victoria (Philadelphia 27 April 1835 – Baden-Baden 11 February 1919); and George (Philadelphia 10 November 1836 – Dusseldorf 14 August 1905). Henriette Wilhelmine (Bohlen) Halbach’s mother, Johanna Magdalena Oswald, was the daughter of Philip Jakob Oswald and Catherine (Hahn) Oswald, and the sister of Maria Margaretta Oswald, who married Charles Louis Cammann. Henriette Wilhelmine (Bohlen) Halbach was aunt, therefore, to Maria Matilda Cammann, who married Anna Whistler’s brother, William Gibbs McNeill. This probably explains why Anna Whistler knew Henriette Halbach and her daughter, Alwine. George Halbach submitted a passport application in 1840, supported by the Bavarian consul at Philadelphia in a letter dated 19 May 1840, to visit Europe with his wife and three of their children. They may have remained there permanently. Anna Whistler quoted in her diaries Henriette Wilhelmine (Bohlen) Halbach’s comments on the revolutions of 1848.

Notes