Appendix E: Biographies

Bliss1

The Bliss family were friends of the Whistler family (see Images 1–21) from the years when the latter lived in Springfield, Massachusetts (1838–1842).

The Honorable and Colonel George Bliss (16 November 1798 – Springfield, MA 19 April 1873) graduated from Yale College in 1812 and was admitted to the bar in 1815, having studied law in the office of his father. He began his practice in Monson, Massachusetts, then went into partnership with his father-in-law, Jonathan Dwight, as the law firm of Dwight and Bliss.

His title of colonel was the result of his service as an aide to General Jacob Bliss in the War of 1812. He was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1827, 1828, 1831, 1832, 1833, 1839, and 1853; in 1853, he was speaker. In 1835, he was a member of the Senate and for a time president of the Senate.

Colonel Bliss was one of the projectors of the Western Railroad, which brought him into close contact with Major Whistler. He became the general agent of this railroad and president of it from 1836 to 1842. He took part early in the movement to build the Springfield and Hartford Railroad. He was president of the Michigan Southern Railroad from 1850 to 1852 and again from 1853 to 1860, and of the Chicago and Mississippi Railroad in 1853 and 1854.

He was a director and the first president of the Chicopee Bank in Springfield, which opened in 1836, and president of the Springfield Cemetery from 1847 to 1872. He was also a philanthropist.

On 20 April 1825, he married Mary Sheperd Dwight (24 February 1801 – 12 February 1870), daughter of his law partner. They were the parents of two children.

Their daughter, Sarah Dwight Bliss (3 June 1826 – North Hartley, QC 8 September 1896) was a close friend of Deborah Whistler. Sarah Bliss married George Walker (1 April 1824 – Washington, DC 15 January 1888) on 24 October 1849 in Springfield, Massachusetts. They are both buried in the Bliss family plot in Springfield Cemetery.

The Blisses’ son, George Bliss Jr. (b. Springfield, MA 3 May 1830; d. Wakefield, RI 1 September 1897; buried Springfield, MA 4 September 1897), a lawyer, married, as his first wife, Catherine Van Renssalaer Dwight (29 March 1835 – 28 September 1884) and, as his second wife, Anais Casey (30 July 1848 – 9 April 1939). He was a convert to Catholicism in his second marriage. George Bliss Jr. produced an autobiography. In it he referred to the love affair between Deborah Whistler and a Russian officer that was the cause of her traveling with the Bliss family in Europe in 1847. He also referred to the fiesty James: “I remember at St. Petersburg greatly disgusting one of major Whistler’s young sons, a boy, as I remember, of twelve or thirteen years, because I had never had on a pair of boxing gloves and could not box. The aforesaid disgusted Jimmy – then a handsome curly headed boy – has since become famous as Whistler, the artist.”

The Bliss family was also close to the family of Capt. William Henry Swift, Major Whistler’s brother-in-law. When Capt. Swift’s first wife died, their daughter, Mary Swift, was brought up in the Bliss home.

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