The Whistlers As They Were in the 1840s

Anna Matilda (McNeill) Whistler

“Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed”1

When Lieutenant George Washington Whistler (see Images 7–8, 21) and Mary Roberdeau Swift (see Image 10) eloped in January 1821, Anna Matilda McNeill (see Images 1–5) was sixteen years old. In December 1827, the first Mrs. Whistler died. Although Whistler’s attentions seemed to have turned to Anna “Mac,” from November 1828 to May 1829 he was in England, sent there by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to study railways. Some six months later, she herself went for her health’s sake to England, where she spent the period from autumn of 1829 to April of 1831 in Preston, Lancashire. Here, she visited for the first time the daughters of her deceased father, Dr. Daniel McNeill (d. 1828; see Image 23),2 from his first marriage – her half-sisters, Alicia McNeill and Eliza (McNeill) (Wellwood) Winstanley (see Images 39–40) – and lived with Eliza and her husband, John, a solicitor. She had taken with her gifts from George Washington Whistler, tokens reflecting his interest in her.3 An “understanding” may have been reached before she sailed, for she felt free to ask in her correspondence, with familiarity, humor, and calculation, to be remembered to him.4 In November 1831, at the age of twenty-seven, almost four years after Mary (Swift) Whistler’s death, Anna “Mac” became the second Mrs. Whistler.5

Whistler’s choice elicited approval from his brother-in-law, Joseph G. Swift (see Image 11), of “a judicious and otherwise good marriage that is to be.”6 Anna had “a very quiet and … assured bearing,”7 “a repose of manner which so charmed people that they termed it a ‘sweet peacefulness,’”8 and “all those qualities which must render her matrimonial career blest and tranquil.”9

In appearance, she was described as “fair, dainty and refined,” with “very beautiful hands, ‘always most carefully kept’ … and pretty feet, ‘with high shapely arches.’”10 The left-profile, waist-length portrait of her by Thomas Wright (see Image 208) executed in Russia in 1845, when she was thirty-nine or forty years old, makes tangible her physical appearance (see Image 1).11 It shows that she was slender and had dark hair, worn in an attractive chignon with a free tendril hanging loose in front of small ears; dark eyes (of indistinguishable color) and eyebrows; a long, straight nose; small chin; erect posture; and small breasts. Her expression is one of pleasant composure, confirming the earlier assessments of quiet self-assurance.

In temperament, in addition to her quiet self-assurance, she was religious, pious, cheerful, modest, compassionate, reclusive, stubborn, restive, and had an explosive temper and a sharp tongue. She loved music and art but had no talent for either. Her forté was words, both spoken and written. She had rare charm as a conversationalist and wrote well. Her descriptions of nature, in particular, to many of her correspondents, were especially attractive. Thus she wrote to James in the winter of 1848: “You know how I delight in the glories of the firmament! The rainbow hues of the clouds thro which the bright sun was glowing, burnishing the windows of the Winter Palace upon which it reflected and every gilded dome and spire sparkling under its influence.”12 And to Joseph Harrison Jr. (see Image 226) she described the first iceberg she had ever seen: “On Sunday when I was on deck an Iceberg was another object of interest to me, as I never before saw one … it looked like a large snowy tent, but thro the glass, with the sun shining bright upon it, rainbow colors were added to its magnificence.”13

Her formal religious affiliation was Episcopalian, which she was introduced to by her mother, Martha (Kingsley) McNeill (see Image 22). Her religious beliefs have been described as “set in the 19th-century mold of evangelical Protestantism” that “permeated the South, characterizing sects such as Presbyterians and Low Church Episcopalians.”14 When living in Brooklyn, she was most likely the “Miss McNeill” recorded in 1821 as a communicant at St. Ann’s Church, along with her parents, Martha and Dr. Daniel McNeill.15 In St. Petersburg, she attended the English Church (see Images 110–111) on Sunday mornings and sometimes the afternoon services there as well. Otherwise, on Sunday afternoons she attended the service at the British and American Congregational Church (see Image 125), where her friends the Ropeses and Gellibrands (see Images 265–266), were communicants. Later, when their minister, Rev. Thomas Scales Ellerby (see Image 256), established a Sunday evening service for the mechanics at the Alexandrofsky Head Mechanical Works (see Images 239–240), she would sometimes attend that as well. Their home on the Peterhof Road in the summer of 1844 was so close to town that it did not keep them from attending the Sunday morning service at the English Church; however, instead of going into town on both Sunday mornings and afternoons, she set up at their dacha in the afternoons a Sunday school, so dear to her heart and at that time impossible to establish at the English Church. It was for James and Willie (see Images 24–30) and any children whose families would permit them to attend, such as the Handyside girls, the Drury boys, and the little Normans. On one occasion, they held a combined Episcopalian and Congregational service.

Like many a second spouse, on entering the marriage Anna Whistler immediately gained step-children: George William (nine years old), Joseph Swift (seven years old), and Deborah Delano (six years old). In 1834, James Abbott was born; in 1836, William McNeill; in 1838, Kirk Boott. An extant letter from 1838 concentrates on children – their accidents and illnesses, their temperaments and toys – and reveals the sensible, humorous, and seemingly unflappable homemaker and mother, who was then seven months pregnant with her fourth child.16

The family lived quite retired from the world,17 the preference of Major Whistler after four years of separation from his children, but Anna Whistler’s choice as well. George William (see Images 12–13) eventually went to work in Lowell in the machine shop of the Proprietors of Locks and Canals; Joseph Swift was sent to a private school; Debo (see Images 17–19, 21), the only daughter, was almost a recluse at home, to be protected from the world by her anxious, loving father.

Anna Whistler set out to create a pious Christian household. The “law of [Major Whistler was] that mother’s wishes should be [the children’s] rule of daily action.’”18 Unfortunately, from the start she presented her religion and wishes so negatively that she turned her family away from it. Kate (Prince) Livermore, while calling her “one of the ‘Saints upon earth’,” acknowledged that “the religion which was so much to her she failed to make sweet and lovely to her sons; too puritanical … and the Sunday to be kept most strictly.”19

It is no surprise, therefore, that outstanding among James’s, Willie’s and their first cousins’ traumatic childhood memories were the Saturday preparations for the Sabbath, when they had to put their toys away until Monday.20 Anna Whistler went “through the boys pockets … taking all balls, toys, knives out of them … all books, even the Rollo21 series, were hidden away, and [the children’s] most exciting reading was Pilgrims Progress,22 and Mrs. Sherwood’s Tales.”23 She “always wore black satin slippers in the house … and as this gave her a noiseless approach … [y]oung culprits were sometimes taken unawares and forthwith marched off to learn the Collect for the day. And if toys were left carelessly about, Mrs. Whistler quietly impounded them, requiring a fine from the owner for the mission box before restoring them.”24

“[M]other’s wishes” had also been accepted by Major Whistler, as he bowed to his wife’s efforts to create a Christian home. He met her more than halfway, stopping, however, at acceptance of the mysteries of her religious faith,25 but he believed her to be “a pure Christian” and hoped he might “profit by her example, she has taught us to say in all sincerity – Gods will be done.”26 She, in turn, deferred to him as head of the family, requesting his permission before engaging in certain actions, such as bringing the frail James to Russia or sitting for the night by the bedside of a sick friend in Russia.

Sometimes, however, they did not see eye-to-eye, and both extant letters and the diaries reflect their disagreements. On the rare occasion when the moment had to be seized or forfeited, such as when she acted impulsively and unilaterally to request Rev. George Williams to read evening prayers in their St. Petersburg living room as he was on the verge of taking his leave, she encountered her husband’s disapproval. She listened to his concerns about possible resulting censure by their fellow communicants in the English Church, discussed her action with the approving Rev. Williams, and vowed in her diaries that she would act unilaterally again if an occasion warranted it.

But her diaries and letters also reflect her total devotion to and deep love for her husband. During her first long separation from him – in which she, not he, left St. Petersburg, traveling to England in the summer of 1847 to spend several months there for the sake of James’s health – her letters to him en route contain passages that must be viewed as love letters. Speaking of the problems arising from James’s present character, so much resembling in its faults her own, she writes about reproaching herself for having rudely rejected a certain birthday gift from her husband. Although he has forgiven her for it, she continues to feel remorse, but acknowledges, “I bless God every day of my life for giving me such a husband, and though I often appear restive, yet believe me your advice and example are not lost upon your fond wife.”27

Urging James to practice “self-denial and obedience” and reminding him of an instance in Russia when his father’s gentle voice attempted to reconcile him to these guiding principles, she lovingly exhorts her late husband: “oh my own loved one! may we all hear thy tones of gentle admonition yet sounding upon our hearts, to induce us to live in constant preparation to meet thee in the paradise of God!”28 And the biographical essay she wrote about him shortly after his death is a paean to her love for him.29

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The positive opinions held of Anna Whistler in her circle in the United States were upheld by persons she encountered in Russia. John Stevenson Maxwell, who lived in the Bobrinskii mansion first with Major Whistler and then with the Whistler family, had the opportunity to observe Anna Whistler closely on a daily basis for about a year, making him a reliable commentator on her consistent traits of character. Observing her submission to the will of God in the affliction she was suffering from Charles Donald Whistler’s death en route to St. Petersburg in 1843, he immediately admired and esteemed her “fervent and unaffected piety.”30 And, on hearing by letter in 1846 of the death of John Bouttatz Whistler, he wrote to Major Whistler of the solace Anna Whistler’s “Christian fortitude and resignation” must have brought him as well.31 He assessed her “good temper and spirits” as her “usual” behavior,32 an effort she acknowledged in the diaries she could make for others no matter how depressed she might herself be feeling. After she had nursed Maxwell back to health from his near-fatal attack of typhus fever in early 1844, he praised her as

one of the sweetest women I ever saw, so amicable, so benevolent, so truly pious, and who amidst all her calamities is so resigned to the will of God and his strenght [sic] finding not only consolation not only for her own afflictions, but for the afflictions of others around her, such religion as she possesses is indeed a treasure in this world, and gives an angelic character and influence alone derived from Heaven. She has told me often of her dear little one’s [sic] who now rest with God and in her chaste sorrow – the very tear drop seemed to bright with the perfect hope of rejoining them again forever. I thought of Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.33

Indicating in his letters to his family that the reclusive Mrs. Whistler did not “go into society,” he described the positive experience of being in her presence in her own home: “within the bounds of the little circle she culls around her, her cheerfulness, goodness, and amiable qualities, make her every day still more the favorite. In truth I never knew … a lady so generally beloved by those with whom she was surrounded, than is this one, and every body likes to go to her house and enjoy her society.”34 If Maxwell saw or heard any of her displays of temper or razor-edged tongue, his correspondence reveals no such behavior. Nor did he comment extensively on her religion, noting only that the family was religious and went to church during Lent every day.

Joseph Harrison Jr. (see Image 226) wrote to his family in Philadelphia after Anna Whistler’s departure for America in 1849: “You will find her a very good and pious woman. – without any form or ceremony,”35 “very kind in her manners, and one whom you will like from the first moment of seeing her … You may recollect that we left Alicia with Mrs. Whistler, when I went to England to bring Sarah home in 1846 … their house seemed like home for all of us.”36

Anna Whistler herself indicated Colin Ingersoll’s attachment to her (see Image 280): “Young Ingersoll seems glad to serve us in any way, our fire side is the only one he feels at home at, tho he is much liked thro out the American circle, the better I know him the more I find in him to admire and esteem. He is here every day, generally dines with us. Father says he seems to look upon me as a mother.”37

The extant negative assessment of Anna Whistler available from the 1840s seems petty and is easily refuted. Some eleven years into the marriage, when Whistler had been in Russia only two months and decided he could not bear to remain there without his family, William Henry Swift wrote his brother, Joseph G. Swift, that he disliked Anna38 because “[u]nder a very quiet and … assured bearing, she has quite a fancy of making a figure” and he “believe[d] her to be both artful and selfish.”39 “Mrs. Whistler wishes to go to England and I dare say she will go there,” he said, probably referring to her stubborn determination to revisit her half-sisters in Preston en route to St. Petersburg.40 As soon as the seriously ill James was pronounced able to travel,41 and Major Whistler had given his approval, Anna Whistler, like “a good soldier’s wife,” made “all her arrangements” briskly and in just two weeks went “to Boston, to New York, to Mrs. Wittenhams (for the daughter) to Brooklyn, to Patterson, to Philadelphia, said her good byes to all her friends, and was off with all her family to England.”42 In addition to what William H. Swift deemed Anna Whistler’s unloving treatment of her step-daughter (his niece), he censured her for carelessly spending her husband’s large Russian salary that could secure their future.43 He was aware, at the same time, as Major Whistler’s financial advisor, that the Major was involved in an argument with his brother-in-law, William Gibbs McNeill (see Image 31), about a supposed agreement to surrender a portion of his Russian salary to the latter,44 that also constituted a serious drain on it; but he chose to censure Anna Whistler, perhaps viewing Major Whistler’s extravagance as an act of honor. Anna Whistler nevertheless spoke kindly of William H. Swift, who continued to handle both Major Whistler’s45 and then her financial affairs after she was widowed.46

In Russia, she demonstrated that despite William Henry Swift’s negative assessment of her she was neither “artful” nor “selfish.”47 She was noticed, in less than a year in St. Petersburg, by other communicants of the English Church and thanked by them for ministering to the recently deceased Mary Gent Hirst during the latter’s terminal illness. She perceived in this attention that she had inherited the mantle of doer-of-good-works so long held by Miss Hirst and accepted it with humility.48

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The diary she was encouraged to keep in Russia became not simply a superficial and chatty recounting of events in her life after the model of Eliza Winstanley’s Edinburgh diary (see Appendix D), but expounded the religious credo that lay at the core of her being. Reproaching her concentration on “self and my own thoughts” as “egotism,” she revealed that the moral model of Christ, resigned and obedient, constituted the mitigating and supportive center of her life. She was at this time a middle-aged woman between thirty-nine and forty-four years of age, but asserting on the eve of her forty-fourth birthday that she felt “as young (in activity) as when in my teens.”49

This decade of the family’s personal life was one of great tragedy. It opened with the death on 1 January 1840 of fifteen-year-old Joseph Swift Whistler, followed by the deaths of Anna Whistler’s niece, eight-year-old Louise McNeill, in July, and of her nephew, ten-year-old Henry Cammann McNeill, in August of that same year. Although the decade proceeded with the birth in 1841 of Charles Donald Whistler, in 1842 four-year-old Kirk Boott Whistler died, and in 1843 two-year-old Charles Donald Whistler. In 1845, John Bouttatz Whistler was born, but died thirteen months later, in October 1846. In 1847, Deborah Delano Whistler’s marriage created a rift with her father that lasted until his death. In 1848, the often alarmingly ill James Abbott Whistler was left in England for the sake of his health. Throughout the decade, George William Whistler was a source of anxiety, irritation, and grief to his parents. In 1849, Major Whistler died. Anna Whistler was sustained during these losses and family strife by her deep religious faith.

While emulating Christ in her own suffering, she, however, maintained the belief that the cause of suffering was the will of a loving God who required total obedience without complaint or else exacted revenge. She harshly viewed the failing health of her sister-in-law, Maria (Cammann) McNeill, as an affliction visited on her and her alcoholic husband, William Gibbs McNeill, because his “pride has resisted all other admonitions” and “remained a scourge still,”50 a reference to his inability to turn for comfort to Christ, “the friend who is closer than a brother – the one for adversity!”51 But of the multiple instances she cites of punishment for rebellion against God’s will, perhaps the harshest concerns children: if the death of a child causes a parent to turn against God and “to the world for comfort,” God deals an even more severe blow “to make us feel our risk in delaying repentance.”52 The culmination of her compassion for Christ’s sufferings and the physical sufferings of her last biological son finds its expression in the diaries in an almost unendurable, long passage of raw-nerved hysteria.53

While regretting that her family did not accept her harsh religion, she never wavered in her beliefs. She did, however, try, unsuccessfully, to present a more palatable form, suggesting to Debo, for example, that she spend time with people who were examples of religion “in its most attractive form” and who exemplified what “a happy thing … [it was] to be a Christian.”54 She wished, when visiting Chaddock Hall (see Image 467), that Debo could have been with her to meet Bessie and Mary Smith, whom she found to be fit examples of attractive Christianity for her step-daughter.

Nor did she have any earthly ambitions for her sons. It was more practical for James to be an architect than an artist, but otherwise she did not ask for them to become important. She felt financial help to George by Joseph Harrison Jr. after Whistler’s death would not build his character. She was more interested in her children’s being spiritual models for others.

* * *

The intellectual aspect of any religion failed to interest her. She considered that “our blessed Saviour [sic] precepts are so plain that he who runneth may read.” She was grateful when able to avoid being present at any discussion of dogma and its fine points, believing that “if we walk humbly as to our own merits, looking to Him as the author and finisher of our salvation ‘fulfilling all righteousness’ we may be saved without diving into mysteries, and these questions are so seldom without bitterness that I dread them.”55

She felt a kinship with communicants of other Protestant denominations, such as the Ropeses and Gellibrands, who were Congregationalists. She attended services of Protestant denominations other than Congregationalists for special reasons, such as the funeral service in the Dutch Reformed Church (see Image 128) for Wilhelmina van Grooten, because she was the sister of her friend Helene Funck. It was her love of vocal religious music, however, that drew her to venues such as the rehearsals of the choristers of the Imperial Choir and a service at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery on the Peterhof Road (see Image 397), and enabled William Hooper Ropes to persuade her to attend early Mass at the Catholic Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria (see Image 127) on her first Easter in Russia.

But the proselytizing side of her nature and her temper constantly got the better of her. While the Nevskii Prospekt bore the name “the street of tolerance” because of the many faiths represented in the houses of worship on it, she was adamantly judgmental in her approach to Orthodoxy. Although she was willing to attend an Orthodox or Catholic service, but not without bewailing the use of an intermediary between the congregation and God, hearing of certain specific Russian religious holidays caused her to give vent to a vituperative remark. For example, the celebration of the death of the Virgin Mary (see Image 382), an official holiday, drew from her the acerbic comment: “I wonder what chronicler informs them.”56 Like William Gellibrand and Mary Gent Hirst, she would have given all but her own salvation to convert Russians to Christ. She berated the English in Russia for not using the advantage of their fluency in the language to influence changes in Russians instead of participating with them in their errors.

Hearing of certain customs of Russian daily life produced a similar reaction. During their summer on the Peterhof Road, the Whistlers were introduced to the practice of a watchman beating on a board at intervals during the night to show his employer that he was carrying out his obligation to ward off thieves and to show his master that he was actually carrying out his task. This elicited the comically irate reaction from Anna Whistler that “it is a shameful evidence of the defects of the religious system, but I trust when the Gospel is preached freely to all nations this people so very apt to learn as they seem may be honest thro love to God & not fear of man.”57

Her pared-down interest in what the world and its powerful considered important actually applied to all facets of life for her: to her views on the Imperial personages of Russia, to her fervent hope that Queen Pomare (see Image 293) would be helped in her hour of need, to the calling up for active military duty of Major Whistler’s brother and nephew (see Images 34–35) in the Mexican War, to the controversy over the Oregon Territory, to the wars in the Caucasus. The human aspect was always paramount and the approach religious.

She felt she ought to attempt to see Nicholas I (see Images 420–423) in public, because she would be asked about him when she returned home, but her interest in him was in the personal and homely, just as it was in the case of all the “ordinary” people she encountered, heard of, or loved.

While witnessing a military review, “Independent Yankee” that he was, young Colin Ingersoll (see Image 280) nevertheless felt that Nicholas I was “no ordinary man”: “Tall, commanding, limbs of faultless symatry [sic] – cold, like a statue, yet strikingly majestic,” “a face classical than otherwise,” Nicholas I was one of “the finest specimens of ‘the human form divine’ [he had] ever seen.” “[H]is presence seem[ed] to inspire [Ingersoll], … as the man, one would select from a crowd of thousands, in any land, as ‘born to command’.”58 While witnessing a similar review, Anna Whistler thought “he looked too proud for mere mortal & … wondered if he remembered the presence of the King of Kings! for … how small was all this array in comparison to the Armies of heaven.”59 She was impressed that at a service at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery (see Image 397), where the emperor asked for a special service and prayers for his dying daughter, Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna (see Images 434, 444, 451), he acknowledged his powerlessness by weeping.60

As a mother, she empathized throughout the diaries with Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna (see Images 420, 424) on the dying and death of a child, but greeted with apprehension the idea that the empress might come to worship Briullov’s portrait of her deceased daughter (see Image 453) installed in the memorial oratory. Two years after the grand duchess’s death, she toured the monuments to her memory (see Images 452–457) and was gratified by their emphasis on the Bible and the homeliness and concentration on family in the hut from which the young woman used to feed the ducks.

She wished the empress could be persuaded to use her influence to ensure that only religious music would be played during Lent, and thought of the aid the value of the Imperial treasures could give to the missionary fund.

She did not refer in her appraisal of Nicholas I to the negative aspects of what some considered an unhinged personality. In the case of his spouse, she ignorantly questioned the justice of those, such as Custine, who, while correctly assessing the empress’s facial tic and wornout appearance to be the result of the terror of the Decembrist Rebellion and of years of childbearing, attributed her resultant permanent debility to a subservience to the whim of the emperor, who pulled her back into the social whirl whenever her health seemed to rally. Such commentators were not suggesting that the Imperial marriage was an unhappy one, despite Anna Whistler’s interpretation that they were (see Appendix B).

The controversy over the Oregon Territory made her anxious, because she loved both America and England deeply and did not wish to have her allegiances challenged by the possibility of having to make a choice between them (see “Maps”). The War with Mexico raised the possibility of the death of close relatives. Events in Russia she understood less well, but reacted to them similarly, influenced in part by what her English and American friends explained to her. She alluded to the war in the Caucasus in terms of the burden of at least fifteen-year conscription on the common soldier. She seemed unaware of why Nicholas I traveled to England in the summer of 1844, but reacted to the fact that as a father he returned immediately when summoned because of the terminal illness of his youngest daughter. The revolutions of 1848 she responded to by copying out from the French newspaper the translated version of the emperor’s speech to his people, the only version she could understand; by referring to their servant Matvey’s allegiance to the emperor; and by mentioning that the emperor and empress appeared frequently in public with many changes of costume. Queen Pomare’s appeal to Queen Victoria (see Image 287) elicited from her and other ladies at tea in the Whistlers’ home the hope that she “might not be deserted in her need by Queen Victoria.”61

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While the question of the emancipation of the slaves in America was cogent at this time, the issue of the Southern-born Anna Whistler’s attitude toward slavery and black people requires consideration, because two males to whom she was closely related, one of whom is mentioned in the diaries and extensively in extant family correspondence, were partners in inter-racial liaisons. Her mother’s brother, Zephaniah Kingsley, was “an Atlantic trader in enslaved Africans, slave plantation owner in Florida, and patriarch of a large mixed-race extended family that functioned in a polygamous fashion.”62 He was not married in a conventional sense to any of the black women with whom he had children.63 The overseer of his San Jose plantation at Fort George Island (see Images 58–60) as of 1838 was Anna Whistler’s brother, Charles Johnston McNeill, who was married to Eliza (Coffee) McNeill, a mulatto.64

Uncle Zephaniah Kingsley, fearing that his manumitted family members and former slaves would suffer in Florida as a result of miscegenation laws, sent them to live in Haiti, “the first free black republic in the Western world,”65 in 1839.66 Before this decision, he had made frequent appraisal trips to Haiti, stopping in New York to conduct business and attend abolitionist meetings, although he eventually ceased to share the speakers’ views.67 He had expressed his views on slavery in legal documents, starting in March 1811, when he freed his wife, Anna Kingsley, and their children.68 He had also expressed these views in newspaper articles and a treatise. Anna Whistler was six years old in March 1811 and living in North Carolina. She had to have heard about her uncle’s life from family conversations. In 1815, her family moved north permanently. It is plausible that she never read his A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society, As It Exists in Some Governments, And Colonies in America, and in the United States, Under the Name of Slavery, published in 1828, when she was twenty-four,69 especially given her reluctance to pursue intellectual arguments.

On 13 September 1843, while in New York, Zephaniah Kingsley died of a heart attack.70 His will, witnessed on 20 July 1843 in Florida, showed that “his concerns were first and foremost for the future of his extended biracial family.”71 He was worried that “my heirs would break my will,”72 and, indeed, in October 1844, Martha (Kingsley) McNeill “filed a petition … to invalidate her brother’s will and to disinherit the designated heirs,”73 listing as co-petitioners her children, including Anna Whistler.74

On 2 March 1846, however, the validity of Zephaniah Kingsley’s will was upheld by the courts.75 No extant document shows what Anna Whistler thought of this action on the part of her mother, whom she deeply loved and was devoted to.

Zephaniah Kingsley died three days before Anna Whistler was to depart for Russia, and she possibly did not know about it until later in her voyage. When she arrived in Russia, her thoughts were all of the loss she had suffered from Charles Donald’s death, but it is interesting that she did not mention Uncle Zephaniah in her St. Petersburg diaries.

The family member who suffered to some extent from Martha (Kingsley) McNeill’s contesting of Zephaniah Kingsley’s will was her own son, Charles Johnston McNeill, who had been named one of three white heirs both to property and money. Kingsley’s wife, Anna’s, petition “that [Charles] be dismissed as overseer at San Jose,”76 led to his being replaced.77 Although Martha (Kingsley) McNeill had spent time in Florida with him as early as 1829,78 in the autumn of 1846, when she was considering coming to live with the Whistlers until they left Russia permanently, Charles Johnston McNeill traveled north and successfully persuaded her instead to accompany him when he returned to Florida.79 For an unknown number of years until her death in 1852, she admirably tutored Eliza (Coffee) McNeill in social behavior and engaged in the religious and moral training of this daughter-in-law and of the grandchildren.

Like Anna Whistler’s religious views, her views on slavery were instilled in her by Martha (Kingsley) McNeill. She refers in her diaries to her mother’s influence in her life, citing proverbs quoted by her and attitudes toward the vicissitudes of life held by her, even demonstrating that her own love of flowers came from her mother. Indeed, in alluding to her mother’s visits to Florida, she chiefly revels in thoughts of the varieties of flowers in bloom there and does not at all mention Charles’s family and her mother’s life with them. There is thus no clear statement as to what she felt about that complex situation, but Charles apparently turned to Anna Whistler for financial help, because her correspondence confirms an instance in which she attempted to solicit a loan for him not only from Joseph Harrison Jr., but from Harrison’s father.80

At her brother’s request, she traveled to Reddys Point and was chaplain to his and Eliza’s children, but she did not have her mother’s devotion to this project. Her chosen enthusiastic charitable efforts for black people seemed to be reading the Bible with them. Thus, while living in Pomfret after her return from Russia, she went “to see a poor old colored woman who is bed ridden & who expresses such a wish for my going often that I shall propose daily reading the scripture to her.”81

Beyond family loyalty, beyond acts of charity to black people, while not a supporter of slavery, she ignored the possible cruelty of slaveowners and lauded the religious preparation being given by them to the slaves to spread the Bible in a future return to Africa. Extant letters reveal that she did not express her views on slavery until pressed after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s tour of England.82 The fact that Mrs. Stowe’s travels in England increased the “popular mania” for her novel resulted in Anna Whistler’s being questioned about her own reaction more frequently than she would have liked. Thus we learn that, while “no advocate for slavery,” she felt she could “witness to the humanity of the owners of southern Atlantic states, & testify that such are benefactors to the race of Ham … that the blacks at the south are cared for by Christian owners, being taught from the gospel & all their religious indulgences provided.” She therefore took “the view that God has permitted the stigma to remain upon our country that missionaries might be prepared for Africa, thro the religious instruction provided by slave owners in our Atlantic states, & that thro the Colonization Society it will be effected.” She felt “Uncle Tom may prove an incentive” in effecting these views, “tho so much romance & poison is mixed up with the abolitionist prejudices of the writer.”83

In 1858, when visiting Charles Johnston McNeill and her southern cousins, she continued to stress the good life she felt she saw the slaves enjoying: “I wish all who are pained at the thoughts of slavery could see the freedom & easy labor of the workies here”; “As to slavery at the south, I never saw servants so free to idle, the owners have the severest task & such a weight of responsibility in the care & training of such families! But it has long been my conviction [through] the Providence of our Lord that heathen Africa may be enlightened by their people of our Southern States. The galleries of all the churches are free to them & very attentive hearers they appear”; “rice and cotton is cultivated by very contented looking negroes.”84

It is noteworthy that Anna Whistler seems not to have meant her diaries to be a confession written for herself alone. She sent Part I to her family in the United States, and took up the writing of Part II chiefly because of her mother’s reception of Part I. Years later, she retrieved them from her lumber room to send to her friend, James Gamble, for him to read himself and to read aloud to a Scottish friend. She was never ashamed of Jesus in the world nor of her religious beliefs.

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While Anna Whistler’s diaries of 1843–1848 reveal the religious and moral aspect of her biography as no other documents written by her do, this essay depends also on her voluminous correspondence in the Whistler Collection at Glasgow University Library and the Pennell–Whistler Collection at the Library of Congress, as well as the correspondence of John Stevenson Maxwell at the New-York Historical Society and Joseph Harrison Jr. at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Swift Papers at the New York Public Library; the correspondence of members of extended family in the Swift Papers at the United States Military Academy Library archives at West Point; Colin Ingersoll’s Journal at Boston University; and, among printed sources, chiefly Kate McDiarmid’s biography of Anna Whistler and Daniel Schafer’s biography of Zephaniah Kingsley.

Notes