North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Cornelia Phillips Spencer: The Foremost Daughter of North Carolina and the Contradictions of a Nineteenth- Century Public Life

133 Cornelia Phillips Spencer The Foremost Daughter of North Carolina and the Contradictions of a Nineteenth-Century Public Life William A. Link    Cornelia Phillips Spencer belongs to a long tradition of conservative women in North Carolina, though few of them articulated their views with the same vigor, enthusiasm, and effectiveness. Today she is perhaps best remembered for her deep-seated beliefs in the inferiority of black people and in their inability to handle civil and political life. Though widely scorned today for her racial invective, she remains an important woman who was able to achieve public stature—an unusual distinction in that era. A leading figure at the University of North Carolina (unc)—one of the state’s most important cultural institutions —she achieved statewide celebrity as a skilled writer who knew how to use words and language effectively. Widowed for most of her adult life, Spencer operated in arenas—politics, journalism, and higher education—that were otherwise largely or entirely male. Mentoring several generations of unc students, she also advised the state’s political leadership, and her influence on powerful men was profound. Though no advocate of equal rights for women, Spencer provides an example of a woman able to accomplish much in a male world. Admittedly, much of her success in public life was indirect and lay in her ability to communicate with men. She loved the power of the written word, especially correspondence; she was an avid letter writer. “When one has anything to write about,” Cornelia once observed, “there is no more care dispelling occupation.” One of her biographers described her rare ability to sustain friendships with “the useful and prominent men of North Carolina who . . . had been Cornelia Phillips Spencer Engraving from the Cornelia Phillips Spencer Papers (#683), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cornelia Phillips Spencer 135 at the University, both those older and younger than herself.” They consulted her frequently, and her “acute mind leaped with theirs to help them define their thought.” Spencer’s literary ability became her way to reach the “hearts and minds of men.” Spencer was formidable and fearless, with a relentless intelligence. Activist, poet, journalist, and historian, she became an accomplished woman in a patriarchal society by adopting provocative, often controversial views. Asked if she was the smartest woman in North Carolina, Civil War governor Zebulon B. Vance observed: “And smartest man, too.” She enthusiastically promoted education , especially at the University of North Carolina, and she also advocated public higher education for women. A promoter of the Lost Cause, she published an early history of the late stages of the Civil War in North Carolina, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (1866). Although not a suffragist, Spencer favored expanding women’s public roles, drawing on their traditional roles in family and church. Spencer exhibited a contradictory combination of accomplishment and intelligence along with a rigid traditionalism. Her life was unusual in that it exemplified how a woman could successfully navigate traditionally male corridors of power. But she also agreed with whites’ consensus about black people in the post-emancipation South. Like many southern whites, she believed that racial subordination was part of the natural order of things. Black enfranchisement and civil rights seemed, to her, a ghastly mistake. And, like many former Confederates, she bitterly resented northern occupation and Republican rule in postwar North Carolina. Spencer was born Cornelia Phillips, in Harlem, New York, on March 20, 1825, the daughter of Judith Vermeule and James Phillips. Her mother was descended from Dutch colonists in New Jersey; her father, a minister and teacher born in England, immigrated to the United States in 1818 and married Judith three years later. Cornelia described her mother’s family as “religious, serious, thoughtful,” her father’s as “more worldly and pleasure-loving, clever and good-natured.” James ran a successful school in Harlem. In 1826, when Cornelia was a year old, he became professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina. Chartered in 1789, the university was located at an elevated spot with springs and hickory and oak forests in central Orange County, at a crossroads known as New Hope Chapel Hill. unc trustees laid a cornerstone for the first building in October 1793, opened the university in 1795, and graduated its first class in 1798. When the Phillipses arrived about a quarter century later, the village of Chapel Hill...