Cornelia Phillips Spencer

Cornelia Phillips Spencer (March 20, 1825 – March 11, 1908) was a poet, social historian and journalist in North Carolina, United States, who was instrumental in reopening the University of North Carolina after a five-year shutdown during the Reconstruction era.

Biography

Cornelia Ann Phillips was born on March 20, 1825, in Harlem, New York City, New York, the youngest of three children born to James Phillips and Judith Vermeule Phillips. (Her brother Samuel F. Phillips was United States solicitor general under President Ulysses S. Grant.) In 1826, James Phillips took a post as a mathematics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She married James Monroe Spencer in 1855 and moved to Alabama, where their only child, Julia (later known as June Spencer Love), was born in 1859. Spencer and her daughter returned to Chapel Hill after her husband's death in 1861, where she began her first book and wrote about the university for local newspapers. She published regular columns in The North Carolina Presbyterian and the Raleigh Sentinel.

She urged the North Carolina legislature to close the university in 1870 to protect the school from Reconstruction politics, later revealed to be her own disagreement with the politics of university leaders at the time.

After Reconstruction, she similarly urged the school's reopening and, on March 20, 1875, Spencer climbed to the roof of the South Building and rang its bell to celebrate. She contributed to the university by writing hymns for special occasions, organizing community events and keeping the alumni records. In 1895, she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the University.