Baltimore Belles & Rebels #4: Union for the Chanceaulmes

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #4: Union by Denniele Bohannon

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #4: Union by Becky Collis

Our Union block is inspired by one in an 1862 Baltimore album quilt top. The block is signed “S Chanceaulme.” BAQ expert Debby Cooney believes the signer is Sarah Ann Chanceaulme (1841-1922.)

Chanceaulme Album dated 1862

Photos are from the Richard Opfer auction site and Stella Rubin’s inventory. Stella graciously allowed Debby to study and photograph details of this important Civil War artifact for the Baltimore Applique Society. The album quilt is unusual, not only because 1862 is rather late for a BAQ, but as Debby writes in her guest post last year:

The top is “is the only one I know of that references the Civil War. Many blocks present martial imagery and wording that support the Union’s goals of keeping the states together and ending slavery. War motifs include U.S. flags, shields, eagles, drums, and liberty caps. Patriotic phrases are inked on several blocks. Others have adapted iconograph of the French revolution and its slogan Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite.”

See her post here: https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2024/05/baltimore-album-with-civil-war-imagery.html

In the 1830s Martin was listed as a cabinet maker.

 Union by Becky Collis

The majority of the names are from the Chanceaulme family, related to Martin Chanceaulme (1788-1863). Born in France, he emigrated to Haiti and then to the U.S. before 1819. He and wife Philadelphian Susanna Hamlet (1796-1859) moved to Baltimore in the 1820s. Martin worked there as a cabinetmaker and wood carver, where numerous daughters were born---maybe not Baltimore Belles in the sense of class and famed beauty but we can imagine a popular group of sisters in a Union-supporting family.

List from the 1850 census showing birth places & ages

1849 was not a good year for Baltimore's "mechanics" when

Martin was classified as "insolvent."

The Block

 

Similar blocks from Civil-War-era Album Quilts

The shield in a laurel wreath symbolizing victors & heroes as well as longevity

Do see all the links for free patterns already posted at last week's entry:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2026/04/baltimore-belles-rebels-links-to-free.html

A Union Belle, cased photo from an online auction

Check our Facebook Group: BaltimoreBellesQuilt https://www.facebook.com/groups/1178792650465362

Buy the pattern here as a PDF for $12 at my Etsy shop.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4421045504/

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: Links to Free Patterns

 

Janet Olmstead's center block

Baltimore Belles & Rebels is our 2026 free pattern for an appliqued 

Block of the Month here at Civil War Quilts. 

Check CivilWarQuilts here on the last Wednesday of each month for a free pattern.

Becky Collis, one of the model makers, is using the traditional

red and green palette with prints from my current Moda fabric 

collection Morris Muse reproducing prints of William Morris.

And others from past Morris lines.

Denniele Bohannon is using red & green but simpler prints 

& woven pattern on a black woven background.

THE PLAN

The official set includes 12 monthly blocks finishing to 18" with a center block finishing to 24" in a frame finishing to 36". With no border: A 72" square quilt. Add your own border. We'll have ideas throughout the year.

Below are links to the monthly patterns beginning with the introduction:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/12/2026-applique-bom-baltimore-belles.html

#1 Open Wreath by Brenda Douglass Esslinger

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2026/01/baltimore-belles-rebels-1-open-wreath.html

Brenda and Janet are two enthusiastic stitchers keeping up each month.

#2 Baltimore Basket by Janet Olmstead

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2026/02/baltimore-belles-rebels-2-baltimore.html

 Janet is using traditional Baltimore colors with a print background

#3 Monument Wreath by Brenda Douglass Esslinger

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2026/03/baltimore-belles-rebels-3-monument.html

Brenda's color scheme is green with raspberry and purple on a diagonal stripe.

(Can't wait to see what she does with those diagonals when she sets it.)

Check our Facebook Group: BaltimoreBellesQuilt https://www.facebook.com/groups/1178792650465362

Buy the pattern here as a PDF for $12 at my Etsy shop.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4421045504/

Confederados #4: Strength in Union for Louisa and Clement Vallandigham

4 Strength in Union by Elsie Ridgley recalling

Louisa and Clement Vallandigham

During the Civil War Southern sympathizers spent time north of the border spying and working against the Union. After Southern surrender many Confederados sought refuge in Canada including members of the Jefferson Davis family. Much traffic, legal and illegal, crossed land and water borders in the 1860s.

Clement Laird Vallandigham (1820-1871)

One unwilling Canadian resident was Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham, deported in 1863 for treasonous activities as head of the “Peace Democrats,” nicknamed the Copperheads after a snake that bites without warning. Born in Ohio, Vallandigham married Louisa Anna McMahon (1820-1871), daughter of a Maryland plantation owner in 1846. They had two sons, one who died as an infant and Charles Noble Vallandigham, born in 1854.

Harper’s Weekly, February 28, 1863

During the Civil War Vallandigham attacked Lincoln and Union war goals. A May, 1863 speech infuriated Major General Ambrose Burnside so much that he broke into the "Copperhead's" Dayton home in the middle of the night and arrested him.

Lincoln banished him to the Confederacy, which did not want him either.

Dixie & the U.S. tossing Vallandigham across the line

After a few weeks in the Confederacy he found passage on a blockade-runner to the Bahamas, then on a ship north to Canada where he established a home in Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit. 

Louisa and son Charles joined him in Ontario where he ran a losing campaign for Ohio’s governorship in absentia with all the trappings continuing back in Ohio: Song clubs, torchlight parades and speakers supporting "The Man in Exile."

Ohio is not far from Canada, just across Lake Erie

After a year in Canada he illegally crossed the border to Detroit in disguise (a pillow strapped around his waist added pounds) and surprised Ohio Democrats holding a local convention, who welcomed him and elected him a national delegate.

Strength in Union by Jeanne Arnieri 

Lebanon House (now the Golden Lamb) about 1930

After the war the Vallandighams resumed their lives in Dayton where he practiced law. In 1871 his life ended in a strange and dramatic fashion in Lebanon, Ohio when he was 53. Boarding at the Lebanon House above while defending a murderer he planned to clear his client by claiming that the victim accidentally shot himself. Vallandigham showed a friend how that might have happened using a pistol he did not know was loaded. He shot himself in the abdomen and died the next day.

A shattered Louisa visited relatives in Maryland where she died less than two months after Clement.

Louisa’s obituary widely copied from the Baltimore Sun August 15, 1871

Strength in Union by Denniele Bohannon

In 1928 author Elbert Benton looked back 70 years and considered the Copperhead/Peace Democrats a result of the politics of “perverted imagination”---perhaps we’d call it paranoid misinformation---a  personality trait all too familiar today.

The Block

Strength in Union

My Encyclopedia and BlockBase tell us that this simple repeat is called Strength in Union from the Nancy Cabot column in the Chicago Tribune of the 1930s. Burnside and Lincoln banished Vallandigham because they realized he was a grassroots force to weaken Union Strength.  In his treason he became The Man Without a Country, inspiring Edward Everett Hale’s famous story.

Ten inch & fifteen inch options

Post your progress in our Facebook Group ConfederadosQuilt.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1910891729507739

Read More

Biography by Clement’s brother:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Life_of_Clement_L_Vallandigham/eyYrAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=life+of+clement+vallandingham&pg=PA14&printsec=frontcover

Ye Book of Copperheads, Cartoons and Poetry

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45274/45274-h/45274-h.htm

The Man without a Country by Edward Everett Hale

The Movement for Peace without a Victory by Elbert J. Benton
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89062261854&seq=7

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #3: Monument Wreath for Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #3 Monument Wreath for

 Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson by Becky Collis

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson Post Shippen (1842-1926)

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson, a prominent member of Baltimore society, showed her rebellion in Union Maryland by forming the Brown Veil Club, supporters of the Confederacy. 

When war began she lived with her parents Arinthea Darby Parker and James Macon Nicholson in the Mount Vernon Place neighborhood at 209 West Monument Street with a view of Baltimore's Washington Monument.

 

Maryland Historical Society

The Brown Veil Club or Monument Street Girls

Standing: Henrietta Penniman Carrington, Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson;

Seated: Sophia Sargeant, Alice Wright, Rebecca Gordon, and Ida Winn

The Monument Street Girls sewed clothing for rebel soldiers and sang in a glee club where they popularized James Ryder Randall’s poem, “Maryland! My Maryland” set to the tune of “Tannenbaum-O Tannenbaum.”  The women staged a small Confederate demonstration after the Southern victory at the Battle of Manassas in July, 1861, marching to Baltimore’s Washington Monument in their West Monument Street neighborhood.  

"The despot’s heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

And be the battle queen of yore,

Maryland! My Maryland!"

In her 1904 account of the club's activities Rebecca recalled they asked men associated with the poem to publish it as a song but they refused, worried about Union retaliation. Rebecca decided to do it herself. Although a Southern sympathizer father James was opposed to Secession inspiring her accurate idea that she could get away with treason. "My father is a Union man, and if I am put in prison, he will take me out." 

Emancipation Celebration Parade on Monument Street by 

Baltimore's African-American community

John Eager Howard Post (1840 -1876)

A year after the war ended Rebecca married Confederate Captain John Post of the First Maryland Cavalry. In the ten years they were married they had six children but only one son survived to adulthood. Her husband died at 36 at their home on West Monument Street. 

Dr. Edward Shippen (1827-1895)

Rebecca's second husband was Union veteran Edward Shippen (1827-1895), a Philadelphia surgeon who served with several Pennsylvania regiments and as superintendent of a hospital at the Capitol building in Washington. They married in 1878 and had a son the following year. Rebecca lived well into the 20th century, dying in 1926. 

Monument Wreath by Denniele Bohannon

The Block

This squarish wreath has become associated with 

Iowa but we see it first in Baltimore applique.

The Library of Congress has Shippen fanily papers, which

include a few embroidery patterns and a scrap of fabric.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/shippen-family-papers/about-this-collection/

Read more about the family:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/08/rebecca-lloyd-nicholsons-civil-war.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/237344414/rebecca_lloyd-shippen

 https://mdhistory.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/822