Cassandra's Circle #10: Carolina Rose/Miriam De Leon Cohen

Cassandra's Circle Block #10 Carolina Rose

by Becky Brown. She simplified the stems and pieced the star.

Mulberry, mid-20th-century view of the main house.

Mary Boykin Chesnut spent time during the war at her in-laws' plantation 3 miles from Camden

in South Carolina's midlands.

Mary was not fond of the small town of Camden where she lived most of her life. She didn't like the neighbors and they apparently didn't care much for her either.

Kamchatka, Library of Congress photo

Before the war Mary and James Chesnut built Kamchatka, a house

  so far from Camden's center they named it after the

remote Russian peninsula. They sold Kamchatka in 1858

when they moved to Washington and James entered the Senate.

In 1851 his Charleston law mentor James Louis Petigru visited the town.

"It is a stationary place. Some planters have good houses and there are 3,000 or 4,000 inhabitants.... My old student James Chesnut is obliging and attentive...a man of consequence here and in Columbia."

Susannah Pangelinan's Carolina Rose

One bright spot for Mary was friend Miriam De Leon Cohen, "My Mem, dear," just about the same age. "I have known her intimately all my life." Like her peers Mary had a hard time referring to Jews without bringing up their religion, actually their caste group. In the diary rework she introduces her: "My Hebrew friend, Mem Cohen, has a son in the war."

Camden's 1826 Kershaw County courthouse, a Robert Mills design, photographed in

 the 1930s by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Library of Congress

These portraits may now be in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery

Mem's maternal grandfather Benjamin Nones accompanied the Marquis de Lafayette from France to fight in the American Revolution and later settled in Philadelphia. The child in the painting is thought to be Mem's mother Bilma Nones de Leon at the age of two or three.

Portrait with puppy

Bilma's Americanized name was Isabel

Mem was named for her grandmother Miriam Marks Nones. Her father's family were Sephardic Jews, leaving the Iberian peninsula for Jamaica and then to the Carolinas. Grandfather Jacob de Leon, born in Jamaica, also fought in the American revolution and settled near Columbia, South Carolina.

"Dr. De Leon (late of the Hospital Dept. of the U. S. Army) tenders his services in the line of his profession to his friends and the Public."Camden Gazette April 3,1816:

Miriam's father Dr. Abraham de Leon, associated with the army during the War of 1812, practiced in Charleston before moving to Camden. Miriam de Leon was born in Sumter in 1822.

Camden, about 1915, fifty years after

Mary and Mem spent their Civil War years there.

Several of Jacob de Leon's sons (Miriam's uncles) were doctors and Miriam herself married a doctor from nearby Sumter, Lawrence Ludlow Cohen in 1840.

Collection of Judith Shanks

This album made for Rebecca Solomons has several blocks dated 1852-1853

made by women named Cohen, perhaps relatives of Mem's husband.

Dr. Cohen did not live long, dying in his early thirties in 1847, leaving Miriam with two children under five: Lawrence Ludlow (called Ludlow) and Isabel.

Miriam's father died the same year she married.

Miriam seems to have been financially stable, a gentlewoman, perhaps left assets by father and husband. As the widowed Jewish wife of a small-town doctor she would have left few records but for her friendship with Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Carolina Rose

by Pat Styring

Mary's circle included several Camden and Columbia Cohens, Mem's first cousins. During the war Mary visited "my Columbia school friend Agnes De Leon (1819-1902), She is fresh from Egypt, and I wished to hear of the Nile, the crocodiles, the mummies, the Sphinx, and the Pyramids. But her head ran upon Washington life...."

Edwin de Leon (1828-1891)

"Mem tells me her cousin, Edwin de Leon, is sent by 

Mr. Davis on a mission to England."

Agnes's younger brother Edwin was the antebellum consul in Egypt, resigning when South Carolina seceded to become a Confederate diplomat. Agnes must have accompanied him on one of his Egyptian trips. Perhaps she was sworn to silence about their travels.

Mem, Agnes and Mary likely met at school. In the darkest days after the war when she was looking like the penniless refugee she was ("dirty, tired, tattered, and torn") Mary reminded a "haughty and highly painted" hotel keeper who she was.

"My home is in Camden."  

"Come, now, I know everybody in Camden."

 "Do you take me for a spy? I know you perfectly well. I went to school with you at Miss Henrietta de Leon's, and my name was Mary Miller."

David Camden de Leon (1816 – 1872)

Portrait by Solomon Nunes Carvalho 

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Another of Agnes's brothers Dr. David Camden De Leon became the Confederacy's first surgeon-general. He also visited Mary during the war's first weeks in Montgomery, Alabama:

"Dr. De Leon called, fresh from Washington, and says General [Winfield] Scott is using all his power and influence to prevent officers from the South resigning their commissions"

Mem's son Ludlow enlisted at 19, serving in Boykin's Rangers under Mary's favorite nephew Captain John Chesnut.

Captain John Chesnut

(1837-1868) 

"Mem Cohen, has a son in the war.... She has long fits of silence, and is absent-minded....The son is the mother's idol." 

The women undoubtedly shared concern about their boys in the same battles. Fears worsened when Ludlow began fighting under Stonewall Jackson. Mem "persistently wept since she heard the news. 'It's no child's play,' she says, 'when you are with Stonewall. He don't play at soldiering.' "

 As Sherman's army threatened South Carolina Mary "packed my valuables one sleety day." On her way to North Carolina she "called to see Mem Cohen who I found on the wing for York and Charlotte."

Both Johnny Chesnut and Ludlow Cohen survived the war but not the peace, both killed before they were 35 by gunfire. Mem died in Sumter in 1869, eight months before Ludlow's death in a Savannah duel at 28.

The Block

The block is drawn from a tattered antique.

We're skipping the reverse applique in the rose.

A sketch of the block, a Rose of Sharon variation, classic old Testament name....

With a six-pointed Star of David.

Applique to an 18-1/2" square or cut it larger and trim later.

The Patterns

One way to print these JPGS:

• Create a new empty JPG file that is 8-1/2" x 11" or a word file.
• Click on the image above.
• Right click on it and save it to your file.
• Print that file out 8-1/2" x 11". Note the inch square block for reference.
• Adjust the printed page size if necessary. Do not use tools like "Fit to page."
• Make templates.
• Add seams when cutting fabric.

 

Becky's nicely balanced set

Rose far from Carolina in an 1860 New York album sampler

made for Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Smith, Elmira.

Chemung County Historical Society Collection.

http://chemungcountyhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/11/commemorative-quilts.html

 

Extra Reading

It's always difficult to read how bigoted people were in the past and how free the felt to express that nastiness in letters and diaries. Dale Rosengarten in her essay in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History writes about the relationship between Mary Chesnut and Mem Cohen.
Mem: "You despise a Jew in your heart....You like me but that is in spite of my being one."

See Dale Rosengarten's chapter "Jewish antiques roadshow: religion and domestic culture in the American South." at this preview.
https://books.google.com/books?id=fmPthcjNHRoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Read more about Mem's French grandfather here:
https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/pair-of-important-jewish-american-portraits-795-c-caccf01683

My #10. I have my nine-block mini pin basted for hand quilting. I think I'll echo quilt.