“Willie’s Gone to Heaven” was submitted for copyright deposit on January 31, 1863, by Horace Waters of New York.

From Evelyn Foster Mornweck’s The Chronicles of Stephen Foster’s Family:

In that dark, last year of his life, 1863, when his critical faculties were at a very low ebb, he produced about a dozen uninspired expressions of religious hack-writing. The worst of all are “Little Ella’s an Angel in the Skies, Sing, Merrily Sing” and “Willie’s Gone to Heaven, Praise the Lord!” Knowing the family risibilities as I do, and especially those of Stephen’s closest associate, Morrison Foster, I can assert positively that if Stephen actually wrote these barbarous compositions, he was far from being his normal self, or he wrote them with his tongue in his cheek. It might be that he had not forgotten a certain communication published in the Musical Review and Choral Advocate of May 2, 1853, by Thomas Hastings, a composer of hymns, who resented the fact that certain Sunday schools were using the melody of “Old Folks at Home” for a hymn. Perhaps it was a sad revenge Stephen took when he foisted “Little Willie” and “Little Ella’s an Angel” on the sanctimonious pedants who had recoiled in horror from “Old Folks at Home.”