43 Right Hand of Friendship

Right Hand of Friendship

By Becky Brown

Right Hand of Friendship can remind us of the networks of help that continued to form an "Underground Railroad" throughout the Civil War.

While slavery's foundations began to crumble in 1861, the system continued in most places until the War was over in 1865. Near St. Louis, Missouri, a border state that never joined the Confederacy, Archer Alexander and his family lived in slavery through much of the War. 

His slave-holding neighbors helped the Confederate cause in small ways by burning bridges to confound Federal patrols. When he heard of a planned bridge attack, Archer impulsively ran to a Union neighbor's home with information. Realizing the consequences his spying would earn him, he kept running---into the city of St. Louis where he was fortunate to meet the family of William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister with abolitionist sympathies. Eliot agreed to hire him and offered to buy his freedom and that of his wife Louisa, left at home with no idea of what had happened to Archer.

William Greenleaf Eliot,

a friend to many slaves.

Louisa received a welcome letter assuring her of her husband's safety and the generous offer of freedom, but had to dictate a sad reply:

"MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I received your letter yesterday, and lost no time in asking Mr. Jim if he would sell me, and what he would take for me. He flew at me, and said I would never get free only at the point of the Baynot, and there was no use in my ever speaking to him any more about it. I don't see how I can ever get away except you get soldiers to take me from the house, as he is watching me night and day. If I can get away I will, but the people here are all afraid to take me away. He is always abusing Lincoln, and calls him a old Rascoll. He is the greatest rebel under heaven. It is a sin to have him loose. He says if he had hold of Lincoln he would chop him up into mincemeat. I had good courage all along until now, but now I am almost heart-broken. Answer this letter as soon as possible. I am your affectionate wife, LOUISA ALEXANDER"

Archer, the Eliots and the Louisa's neighbors formed new plans. The Eliots offered to shelter Louisa and daughter Nellie. A neighbor agreed to carry them in his oxcart to the city for payment of $20. Clad only in day dresses without bonnets or shawls so as not to raise suspicion they were planning to travel, Louisa and Nellie sauntered to the road near their cabin where they'd agreed to rendezvous. The farmer hid them under the cornshucks in the wagon and casually walked along, leading his oxen to the city as farmers did every day. Despite questioning by suspicious locals, the escape was a success.

Letters sent by the U.S. Post Office during the War looked much like ours today

with envelopes, 3 cent cancelled stamps and a date cancellation.

Louisa and Archer could not read or write, yet they managed to carry out a complex plan by mail. We often think of illiterate people as being deprived of any written communication (a possible reason for all the stories about secret visual codes in tales of slavery) but we should realize many social systems were in place to assist those who needed help.  In Louisa's case sympathetic neighbors took dictation and carried their correspondence, acting as an informal and illegal post office.

Archer Alexander so impressed William Eliot that the minister wrote his story as a legacy for the Eliot grandchildren, hoping to keep the story of slavery alive for future generations. Eliot eventually published the account in the 1880s. William Eliot's school, the Eliot Seminary, became Washington University. One of the grandchildren for whom he wrote the Alexanders' story grew up to be T. S. Eliot, the modernist poet.

Archer, a handsome man into his old age, became the model for sculptor Thomas Ball who had a commission from former slaves to create a statue of Lincoln the Emancipator. Freedom's Memorial, a portrait of Lincoln and a kneeling slave, can be seen in Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. In the sculpture Archer Alexander assumed the pose of the shackled, kneeling slave---the image that had represented the antislavery movement for over a century.

Today that image rankles. Archer seems to symbolize passivity, a man waiting to be rescued. But it is important to recall that the kneeling slave had great meaning for blacks and whites during his life time. The man in shackles signified both a sympathy for the slaves' plight and a willingness to act.


 

The quilt block Right Hand of Friendship was published by Hearth and Home magazine in the early 20th century. It is BlockBase #2831.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 background squares 3-1/8".

B Cut 1 background, 1 dark and 1 medium square 3-7/8". Cut each into 4 triangles with two diagonal cuts. You need 4 of each.

C Cut 1 dark and 1 medium square 3-1/2". Cut each into 2 triangles with one diagonal cut. You need 2 of each.

Read William Greenleaf Eliot's book: The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom at the Documents of the American South webpage.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/eliot/menu.html 

40 Order Number Eleven

Order Number Eleven
By Becky Brown

Order Number Eleven was named for a Union order forcing Southern sympathizers to leave their homes.

The quilt design Order Number 11 was published in the Kansas City Star in 1929 by Ruby Short McKim, a pattern designer from Independence, Missouri. She told the story of Fannie Kreeger Haller who as a ten-year-old, "saw her mother's choice new quilt snatched from their bed by marauders back in 18[63]when Order No. 11 was the issue. She carried the treasured design in her mind and years after reproduced the quilt, christening it 'Order No. 11'."

Detail of George Caleb Bingham's painting Martial Law or Order #11.

Is that a quilt being stolen on the balcony?

This dramatic painting by Mattie Bingham's husband is one reason the story of Order #11 lives on. See Mattie's story in Block#19.

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/05/19-missouri-star.html

Even sixty-five years later, McKim's readers would have been quite familiar with the issue of Order Number 11. In 1863 Missouri Bushwhackers under the control of William Quantrill burned the pro-Union town of Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the Jayhawkers. Quantrill's raiders murdered every man and boy they could find, killing nearly 200. Four days later the Federal Army issued the order evacuating four counties in western Missouri in what could be seen as either a wise precaution or a vicious act of revenge.

Union soldiers and guerillas terrorized families into leaving by burning their homes and stealing their possessions. Unionist Missourians were permitted to move to designated military outposts or to Kansas. Those without certificates of loyalty had to leave. The roads south of Kansas City were filled with frightened and angry refugees, among them Bursheba Younger. (See her story in Block #30: http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2011/07/28-next-door-neighbor.html)

Fannie's mother's quilt, which was jayhawked right off the bed, was of the design also known as Hickory Leaf or the Reel, a pattern that dates back to the 1840s. 

The early versions were sometimes pieced but most are applique.

Nancy Harris McCorkle and Charity McCorkle Kerr

Sisters-in-law Nannie and Charity were Confederate sympathizers who aided Missouri guerilla Bushwhackers and were imprisoned in Kansas City. The jail fell down killing Charity and three other women, one in a series of heartbreaking events that led to Order Number 11.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

Cut a square 8-1/2" of background fabric.
See the templates here: https://acrobat.com/#d=dGRUH6p5yJW6uM7Rne8YHw
Use the templates in the PDF file to cut the applique pieces. Add a scant 1/4" seam allowance to the pieces.

You need 1 of the large piece A and 4 of the crescent B.

Prepare and applique in your favorite manner.

Remember if the PDF prints out the wrong size you can adjust the size when you are giving your printer instructions. If it's too big--- try printing it at 50% and see how it looks in the preview. Adjust the percentage until the block fits within the margins of an 8-1/2 x 11" piece of paper. It should then fit fine in your 8" block.

Another way to do this pattern is to applique the whole figure as one piece. See Jo Morton's popular pattern "Rachel's Reel" for a similar design with a single applique patch that fits into an 8" square.

The Reel design is one of the classic patchwork patterns from before the Civil War.

Here it's been modified with a white signature strip across each block. The quilt (probably about 1850) was advertised as a New Jersey quilt in an online auction.

In 1904 Caroline Abbot Stanley wrote a novel called Order Number Eleven: A Tale of the Border, as partisan and romantic as Bingham's painting. Read it here at Google Books

http://books.google.com/books?id=r2QpAQAAIAAJ&dq=order+caroline+stanley&source=gbs_navlinks_s

39 Hovering Hawks

Hovering Hawks

by Becky Brown

Hovering Hawks can symbolize foraging soldiers on both sides. Hawks are predators that keep a hawk-eye out for a breakfast of smaller birds and rodents, so one can see how their name was appropriated for predatory scavengers during the Civil War.

Red-tailed hawk

Best known are the Jayhawks or Jayhawkers who swooped in during the pre-war days of the Kansas Troubles. In Kansas lore Jayhawker is an Irish term, brought by an immigrant (one mythical Pat Devlin) who explained:

"In old Ireland we have a bird we call the jayhawk that when it catches another bird it takes delight in bullyraging the life out of it like a cat does a mouse...You call it 'foraging off the enemy,' by, begobs I'll call it jayhawking."

Senator James H. Lane on the cover of

Harper's Weekly in November, 1861

Once the Civil War began, jayhawking took place under cover of war strategy. In September, 1861 Kansas troops under U.S. Senator James Lane sacked the town of Osceola, Missouri. Captain Edgar Poe Trego wrote his wife that the Kansans returned,

 "having had a brush with the enemy, scattered them, took the town, obtained all the horses, mules, wagons and [Negros]; loaded the wagons with valuables from the numerous well-supplied stores and then set fire to the infernal town."

Many Southerners blamed Jayhawkers for any and all raids, down into the deep South. Roxanna Cole in North Carolina complained about a Colonel Lee and his Jayhawkers for local depredations:

" 'subsisting on the enemy' they call it. But they don't tell that they take the bread from women and children (for men are long since gone) while they also take the only means to make more---the horses, stock, and negroes. They, as usual, took our scanty supply of food and make us cook it, Christmas day though it was. They came and demanded quilts and comforts. I told them that I had none that I could spare. They answered insolently that 'It makes no difference about that, Go and get two. I almost cried that I had to give up my nice comforts to such swine and I had none but nice ones."

Hawk seems to have meant a thief of any kind. In 1861 Anne S. Frobel in Northern Virginia instructed her slaves to bury the silver, a common precaution, exclaiming in her diary,

"What spoonhawks these Yankees are!"

Hovering Hawks is BlockBase #1323, given that name by Ruth Finley in 1929.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 2 dark and 4 blue squares 2-1/2".

B - Cut 1 dark, 3 light, 2 orange (or brick red) and 4 blue squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally. You need 2 dark, 6 light, 4 orange and 8 blue triangles (20 in all).

 

See a lovely applique quilt that was probably jayhawked from a Southern family. It eventually wound up in the Kansas State Historical Society. Click here:

http://www.kshs.org/p/cool-things-civil-war-quilt/15368

What quilthawks those Yankees were!

35 Star of the West

Star of the West

By Becky Brown

Star of the West can symbolize the Frémonts. Jessie and John C. Frémont were a mid-19th century power couple.

Jessie Benton Frémont

Their marriage was a political partnership, an idea ahead of its time. Jessie's father was an important Senator, so she had many influential friends and relatives. John was known for his western explorations, for his Presidential run as the first Republican candidate in 1856 and for his arrogance in the face of authority.

Frémont was a western explorer and

 a founder of the state of California

During the summer of 1861 General Frémont  became commander of the Union Army in Missouri, a difficult job in a state torn by conflicting loyalties. On August 30th he declared martial law, describing Missouri as disorganized and infested by murderers and marauders under a helpless civil authority,  He stated that armed rebels would be court-martialed, shot and their property confiscated. Furthermore, their slaves "are hereby declared freemen."

Most Missouri slaves like Winnie, whose portrait was recorded

 during the WPA projects, remained in slavery throughout the war.

Frémont 's Missouri emancipation proclamation displeased President Lincoln. The Commander-in-Chief sent a letter by special messenger on September 2nd, warning Frémont that "liberating slaves of traitorous owners will alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us." The idea of confiscated slaves as "contraband" was one thing, confiscated slaves as free men another.

Frémont  publicly refused to rescind his order. Jessie went to Washington to argue their case for emancipation with Lincoln. She later wrote of their encounter, recounting her argument that Frémont's move would win the Union international friends.

 "The President said 'You are quite a female politician.' I felt the sneering tone and saw there was a foregone decision against all listening. Then the President spoke more rapidly and unrestrainedly: 'The General ought not to have done it... the General should never have dragged the negro into the war. It is a war for a great national object and the negro has nothing to do with it.' "

Lincoln recalled the testy meeting for his secretary.

“She sought an audience with me at midnight and taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarreling with her."

Jessie was remarkably out of place, a wife deputized to discuss policy with the President. The meeting went badly and so did Frémont's subsequent career. Lincoln removed him from the Missouri command in November. The War remained an official fight for the Union, not a fight against slavery....for the time being.

In this cartoon a pouting John C. Frémont holding an African-American doll sports a head wound inscribed "Lincoln."  The Doctor tells a worried Mrs. Columbia that it's only "a case of Sore Head."

Star of the West (#1128 in BlockBase) is an old block with many other names, among them Clay's Choice and Harry's Star. Both names, according to Ruth Finley in her 1929 book, were tributes to Henry Clay, an earlier politician who also ran unsuccessfully for President.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 8 background squares 2-1/2".

B Cut 4 medium, 2 dark and 2  background squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half diagonally
.

You need 8 medium, 4 dark and 4 background triangles.

 

The Frémonts returned to California where

Jessie was photographed on her porch

at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Read more about the Frémonts and events of the summer and fall of 1861 at this blog post:
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=714&subjectID=2   

Read Jessie's letters:

The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, Pamela Herr & Mary Lee Spence (editors), University of Illinois Press, 1993.

28 Next Door Neighbor

Next Door Neighbor by Becky Brown, who writes:

"I think the more fabrics in a block the better."

The Next Door Neighbor block can remind us of war's tendency to turn neighbors against each other. Few victims of our Civil War represent a splintered community better than Bursheba Fristoe Younger whose haunting face on the left is a signature of this blog. Born in Kentucky, she moved to the new state of Missouri as a child and married Henry Younger, a drover, livery operator and trader in the western part of the state neighboring on the Kansas Territory. Her slave-holding family played a part in nearly every act of the Kansas-Missouri border conflict that grew into Civil War.

Henry Washington Younger

Bursheba and Henry had fourteen children and a prosperous home in the mid-1850s, but when the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitted settlers to vote the territory as free state or slave state, Henry felt compelled to act for a proslavery Kansas and  established a town and residence just over the border. He was elected to the new territorial legislature, often called the Bogus Legislature because voters and members were actual Missouri residents.

When free-state Kansans gained political control, Missourians abandoned their Kansas settlements. Henry opened a general store in Harrisonville, Missouri, and became mayor.

After war was declared in 1861 he supported the state's Union government. Neutrality was as dangerous as partisanship and Henry was shot dead on a Kansas road in 1862.  His murder was probably revenge, either for his proslavery politics or for his sons' reputations. Some say Jim and Cole Younger became bushwhackers to avenge their father's death; others believe Henry  was killed as a lesson to parents who let their boys run wild.

The widowed Bursheba could find no peace in guerilla-torn Missouri. The Union Army and the Kansas Jayhawkers harassed her, burning her house and then the neighbors' houses where she sought refuge.  Her sons were among Quantrill's Raiders who attacked Lawrence, Kansas in 1863, an act avenged by the Union Army's Order Number 11 creating a no man's land in western Missouri. With her Southern neighbors Bursheba and her youngest children walked south to Texas, settling near Sherman.

Four of Bursheba's 14 children

Henrietta with Jim, Bob and Cole Younger.

Bob died in prison in 1889. Jim committed suicide in 1902 and Cole lived to join a Wild West Show in the early 20th century.

Bursheba's boys refused to surrender. With a few other guerillas who turned to crime, Cole and Jim Younger became Missouri folk heroes. Their mother was periodically terrorized by lawmen looking for the gang. She returned to Missouri in 1870 where she died shortly after at the age of 54.

Bursheba's portrait from a 1906 book.

Worse things happened to her than

 being remembered as the mother of outlaws.

The Next Door Neighbor block was given that name by the Ladies' Art Company of St. Louis in the early 20th century. It's BlockBase #2787.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 1 very dark, 1 medium and 2 background squares 2-7/8". Cut each in half with a diagonal cut. 

You need 2 very dark triangles, 2 medium triangles and 4 background triangles.

B Cut 1 light, 1 medium and 1 background squares 5-1/4". Cut into 4 triangles with 2 diagonal cuts.

You need 4 light, 4 medium and 4 background triangles.

Piece this block in diagonal strips.

19 Missouri Star

Missouri Star by Gloria Clark

Missouri Star can remind us of Mattie Lykins Bingham who represents well the torn loyalties of the people of Missouri. Wife of two Union sympathizers, she maintained her Confederate allegiances to her death in 1890.

Mattie about 1875.

In early May, 1861, Confederates seized arms in Kansas City and gathered near the St. Louis Arsenal intending to confiscate weapons there. Federal troops raided their camp and marched the captured Confederates through St. Louis inspiring violence from rebel bystanders. The St. Louis Riots increasing hostilities between the country residents with roots in Kentucky and Tennessee and the city dwellers, recent immigrants from Germany and Ireland. The Union armies might control the cities but no one could control Missouri's rural areas.  

Mattie, born in Kentucky in 1824, married Kansas Citian Johnston Lykins, a former missionary to the Kansas tribes, who made a good deal of money in real estate. Although her banker husband was a Unionist in a Union town, Mattie was an outspoken Southron, to use a period word.

Missouri remained a Union state. In 1863 the Federal forces governing Kansas City banished her to the country for the duration. She was suspected of spying for Confederate guerillas, particularly blamed for their deadly raid on the Union town of Lawrence, Kansas. Kansas Citians told of her waving to her husband on the shore as the riverboat took her to her exile, calling to him to take care of his laundry.

After the War Mattie returned to Kansas City and became the woman behind local campaigns to remember The Lost Cause. She organized Confederate burial grounds, an orphanage and an old soldiers' home.

A weathered angel watches over children

 at a school on the site of

Mattie's Confederate Orphanage in Kansas city.

After Lykins's death in 1878 she married former Union officer George Caleb Bingham. Bingham, a well-known artist, painted "Order Number Eleven," depicting the banishment of Southern sympathizers from their homes in 1863.

A detail of Bingham's Order Number Eleven.

Get your applique needles ready,

 we'll be doing a quilt pattern named Order Number Eleven in a few months.

Mattie left a will directing that all Bingham's paintings be sold to fund the Missouri Confederate Home. She's buried between the graves of her two husbands at Kansas City's Union Cemetery.

Missouri Star is #2154 in BlockBase and my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. The name was given to this star by the Nancy Cabot column of the Chicago Tribune in 1933.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 squares 2-1/2" light.

B Cut 2 squares of medium and 2 squares of dark each 3-1/4". Cut each into 4 triangles with 2 cuts. You need 4 triangles of each.

(See below of another idea for these triangles if you are working small.)
C Cut 1 square 5-1/4" light. Cut it into 4 triangles with 2 cuts. You need 4 triangles.

D Cut 2 dark squares 2-7/8". Cut each into 2 triangles with 1 diagonal cut. You need 4 triangles.

E Cut 1 medium square 3-3/8".

Another idea for the star points B if you are working small. Instead of using the measurements for B cut 8 more triangles the same size as D but fussy cut them across a stripe. (Make yourself a transparent template from one of your D pieces so you get the stripe right.)

The beneficiary of Mattie's will:

The Confederate Home of Missouri

Read more about the remarkable Mattie Lykins Bingham in my book on the Civil War on the Missouri/Kansas border: Borderland in Butternut and Blue.

Click here:

https://www.pickledishstore.com/productDetail.php?PID=765

And read more about George Caleb Bingham by clicking here:

http://www.georgecalebbingham.org/bio.htm 

Rose Ann Findlen has published a new biography of Mattie through the Jackson County (Missouri) Historical Society. Click here to read about Missouri Star: The Life and Times of Martha A. "Mattie" (Livingston) Lykins Bingham:

http://store.jchs.org/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=1093

Woman with a reading glass

Mattie's been in the news in Kansas City lately. A very lucky woman bought an unsigned portrait of a woman in a Missouri antique shop. It looks just like Mattie to me, and many people believe it to be a lost Bingham painting of his third wife.  

Missouri Star

by Becky Brown