Threads of Memory 5: Madison Star for Delia Webster

5 Madison Star by Becky Brown

 The patterns were free online for two years but now I am offering them for sale in two formats

at my Etsy shop. Buy a PDF or a Paper Pattern through the mail here:

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In June, 1854 a woman who'd been hiding on the Kentucky bluffs overlooking the Ohio River found passage over the water to the free state of Indiana. Sympathetic Hoosiers hid her under hay stacks and brush heaps. Delia Webster had, declared the Madison Courier, "escaped on the 'underground railroad', vanished, vamoosed…"

"Running Down Slaves With Dogs"

Delia was not a fugitive slave but a notorious "negro stealer." After serving time in a Kentucky prison, she had purchased a Kentucky farm for a station on the Underground Railroad---an act defying both prudence and the Kentucky authorities. She was, "a very bold and defiant kind of woman, without a spark of feminine modesty," criticized the Louisville Democrat.

Delia Ann Webster (1817-1876)

about the time of the

 end of the Civil War

Delia Webster's life story with its cliff-hanging moments and daring escapes reads like a melodrama. Like all melodramas, the story omits character shading to help us understand her motives and emotions.

Webster never fit the stereotype of 

 New England abolitionist illustrated in 

Albert D. Richardson's Beyond the Mississippi

At 26 years of age she traveled from her Vermont home to Kentucky to teach. Delia apparently planned to lead a double life spiriting runaway slaves to safety as she taught their owners' children.

Much of her Underground Railroad activity remains secret. Her best documented escapade, helping the Lewis & Harriet Hayden family in 1844, is known only because she and co-conspirator Calvin Fairbank were arrested, convicted and jailed in the Kentucky Penitentiary. Sentenced to two years, Delia served about six weeks as the prison's only female inmate. Her 1845 pardon has been attributed to her charm. She captivated Warden Newton Craig and his wife Lucy.

Freed and famous, Delia returned to Vermont and published a book, an unreliable account of the Haydens' escape in answer to "low innuendoes and foul detraction."

After four years she again traveled South, settling in Madison, Indiana, a town that was by accident of geography an important junction of the Underground Railroad.

Routes for runaways from the Ohio River south of 

Indiana and Ohio up to Michigan and Canada.

The arrow points to Madison.

Just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, Madison was perched between the river and a vertical slope covered with an unruly woodland where escapees could hide out in a forest of ridges and hollows. Delia is rumored to have helped many.

Madison Star by Jean Stanclift

Madison was divided between slavery's supporters and freedom's advocates.The notorious abolitionist was unwelcome even before she scandalized Madison's citizens by carrying on a very public relationship with the married Kentucky warden who'd signed her pardon.

 Kentucky's bluffs across the Ohio River from 

Madison, Indiana today. It's said that Madison knew when 

Kentucky vigilantes were raiding Delia's farm

 by the glow of burning outbuildings on the ridge.

After a few years, Delia wearied of waiting for fugitives to come to her and borrowed money from Warden Craig to buy farmland on the Kentucky plateau opposite Madison, a perfect temporary refuge for runaways on the first leg of the journey. Kentucky's slaveholders had only circumstantial evidence of her help with escapes. With Delia Webster living in Trimble County, the slave population declined.

By 1854 affection between warden and ex-prisoner faded. Delia, long on nerve but short on discretion, published Craig's letters hoping to ruin his career. He retaliated by reviving the ten-year-old case against her for Harriet Hayden's rescue. (She'd served time only for helping Lewis Hayden.)

Delia's much-publicized escape from her second Kentucky trial into the hills behind Madison eventually landed her in the city's jail, but Indiana courts set her free, refusing to return her. Delia realized Kentucky's danger and never crossed the river again.

Stevens House, Vergennes, Vermont

She went home to New England and spent the time before the Civil War writing and lecturing about her exploits and the evils of slavery.

DELIA WEBSTER AGAIN.

Her 1854 escape to Indiana received a good deal of newspaper coverage.

See an article in the New York Times here:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F70E16FF3959157493C6AB178CD85F408584F9

This photograph of Delia and her sisters in their forties and fifties gives a glimpse of Delia's theatrical personality. Her sisters have dressed their hair in up-to-date style with center parts but Delia wears a fringe (bangs) with old-fashioned sausage curls, perhaps to recapture the look of her heyday in the 1840s. She's painted her lips and cheeks. She might have indulged in the plastic surgery of the era, having wax injected under her skin, as she bears little resemblance to her pleasantly aging sisters.

Madison Star by Dustin Cecil

Delia lived into her mid eighties, dying in Des Moines in 1904, eccentric and mysterious to the end.

Madison Star by Dustin Cecil

Make a Quilt a Month

Set four Madison Stars side by side to make a small wall quilt. Keep the fabric in the center pinwheel the same but vary the colors in each block to create a sparkling quartet. Add a 2-inch finished inner border and a 4" finished outer border for a 36" square quilt.

What We Can Learn About the Underground Railroad from Delia Webster's Story.

Assisting escaping slaves was dangerous work. Agents were arrested and jailed by Southern authorities and occasionally executed by vigilantes. Delia served only six weeks for helping Lewis Hayden but Calvin Fairbank spent 17 years in confinement for two separate convictions.

Marker in Trimble County, Kentucky

Links to More Information:

You can read Delia Webster's account of her trial for aiding the Haydens in her pamphlet:

Kentucky jurisprudence: a history of the trial of Miss Delia A. Webster at Lexington, Kentucky, Dec'r 17-21, 1844 before the Hon. Richard Buckner on a charge of aiding slaves to escape from that commonwealth, with miscellaneous remarks, including her views on American slavery / written by herself. 

Click here to see it at the Kentucky Digital Library.
http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7mcv4bpd7x_7?

She described the escape rather unreliably and included trial transcripts and accounts of her imprisonment and pardon. She later claimed her father forced her to lie about the Haydens' escape. 

Her anti-slavery partner also wrote a memoir. Click here to read it at the Internet Archive:
Rev. Calvin Fairbank During Slavery Times: How He "Fought the Good Fight" to Prepare "the Way."
https://archive.org/details/durringslavery00fairrich

Lewis and Harriet Hayden wound up in Boston after Webster and Fairbank got them out of Kentucky. See a picture of their Boston house and read about their activities in the fight for freedom by clicking on this link:

http://www.nps.gov/boaf/historyculture/lewis-and-harriet-hayden-house.htm

Find Out More In Print

For much more about Delia Webster's story see Randolph Paul Runyon's biography, Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). For a review of the book from H-Net Online click on this link:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=15581857574286