[1][3] At the age of fifteen, he began a career in the field of telegraphy, later working as a manager in a telegraph office in Cleveland, Ohio.

[4] Hayes, upon becoming president, directed the Treasury Department to notify Cornell that he must resign from the state and national Republican committees as a condition of remaining naval officer.

Regarding this as an invasion of his civil and political rights, Cornell declined to obey the mandate, whereupon a successor was nominated, but was rejected by the Senate.

After the adjournment of the Senate in July 1878, Hayes suspended both the collector (Chester A. Arthur) and the naval officer, and their successors were finally confirmed.

At the subsequent elections, Cornell was chosen Governor of New York and Arthur became Vice President of the United States.

Together, they were the parents of:[6] After the death of his first wife in 1893, he remarried on June 8, 1894, to her younger sister, Esther Elizabeth Covert (1839–1923), a native of Auburn, New York.

After suffering a stroke of apoplexy followed by Bright's disease in August 1904,[13] Cornell died on October 15, 1904, in Ithaca, aged 72.