Ellen Mitchell

Ellen M. Mitchell (1838–1920) was an American philosopher, educator and education reformer. She was one of the first women to be appointed lecturer in a university, in addition to writing philosophy, literature and literary criticism. Biography Ellen M. Smith was born in the Village of Geddes, New York to Harriet H. Rowland and Edwin R. Smith, the eldest of their four children. In 1851, when Ellen was a teenager, the escaped slave William "Jerry" Henry was released from jail in the adjacent City of Syracuse by a band of citizens, cementing central New York's reputation as a hotbed of abolition. She graduated from the Cortland Academy, Homer, N.Y. in 1860, with a major in classics. Ellen, also, taught school in Syracuse, New York. During the Civil War her brother, Edwin R. Smith, Jr., served in New York's 149th Regiment. Edwin was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863. He was initially reported severely wounded; the family tried to determine whether the Confederates had captured him and treated him in the Confederate field hospital at Ellwood Manor. However, Edwin was lost without a trace. Ellen adopted the pen name "Ella Ellwood" in identification with Edwin, writing with the name Ellwood during the war. Following Edwin's death, Ellen resigned her teaching position in Syracuse and moved to Cairo, Illinois, where she lived with her uncle, Ward L. Smith and his wife, Anna. During the war, Ellen moved to St. Louis, Missouri. She wrote for the Missouri Republican newspaper of St. Louis, continuing to use the pen name Ella Ellwood until the war's end. She married St. Louis attorney and Union civil war veteran Joseph W. Mitchell in the Presbyterian Church of Alton, Illinois in September, 1867. Alton, Illinois had been, before the war, a primary source of advocacy for abolition of slavery, and was the location of the murder of the influential abolitionist advocate, the Presbyterian minister Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, and the destruction of his printing press by a pro-slavery mob from St. Louis. The marriage of Ellen and Joseph was, thus, their consecration to the union cause. While in St. Louis, she attended the Hegelian philosophy lectures which had been organized there by William T. Harris.