First Ladies of the United States: Mary Arthur McElroy

Chester Alan Arthur became the twenty-first president of the United States upon James A. Garfield's death. Not since James Buchanan's 1857–1861 stay in the White House had an unmarried president resided there. While Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor, Arthur was a widower. Ellen Herndon Arthur, whom the future president married in 1859, died at the age of forty-two, on January 12, 1880, just five months before Chester A. Arthur became the surprise vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Garfield, himself a surprise presidential nominee. Her death left Arthur a grieving widower and the single father to their two children. Upon becoming president, for over a year, Arthur had no one in the White House to serve as a surrogate first lady. In January 1883 he asked his youngest sister, Mary Arthur McElroy, to come from her Albany home to the White House as his “hostess” for the annual social season, in order to help plan White House social functions and also care for his young daughter Nellie. Mary, forty-one years old at the time, agreed. “When I went to it,” she later recalled, “I was absolutely unfamiliar with the customs and formalities” (quoted in Reeves, 1975: 269)...