Eleanor Percy Lee - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Eleanor Percy Ware was the second daughter of Sarah Percy and her second husband Major Nathaniel Ware, an attorney and aide to the Mississippi territorial governor. (Sarah was the widow of Judge John Ellis, who died in 1808, and she had a son and a daughter with him.) Sarah was from a prominent Southern family with a noted vulnerability to mental illness. She was 39 when Eleanor was born and suffered from post-partum depression following the birth. She never fully recovered

Ware moved his family from Natchez, Mississippi to Philadelphia, where Sarah could be treated. She was the highest-paying patient, and the only one accompanied by a resident slave, at the Pennsylvania Hospital, then one of the few institutions that clinically treated the mentally ill.

The girls attended the academy of Mme. Aimée Sigoigne, an émigré from Haiti. Her French-speaking school attracted many upper-class Southerners and Philadelphians. Ware frequently took his young daughters with him on his travels, as well.

In 1831, Ware moved Sarah back to Natchez, where she was under the care of her son Thomas George Ellis, from her first marriage. Catherine Anne and Eleanor would visit their mother every summer when home from school. She died in 1836.