Yankee Notions #8: Union Star

Yankee Notions Block #8 

Union Star by Denniele Bohannon

Union Star represents conflicting notions of the United States and exactly how they were united in the decades before the Civil War began.

"The Uni-on for ever

1850"

Center of a quilt by Elizabeth Helm Walker Stone (1828-1898), Kentucky

Winterthur Museum

Elizabeth's quilt reflects one view in a border state.

See a post here:

 https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-union-forever.html

In 1830 South Carolina's Senator Robert Hayne championed the idea of nullification, arguing that states could ignore or nullify federal laws not in their own interests (or in the interests of the politicians in charge.)

Webster giving his speech on Liberty & Union in the Senate

Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster made himself famous with his ringing answer that the U.S. was not an association of sovereign states able to choose which laws to obey. Liberty to follow regional interests would destroy the constitutional idea of a union. Liberty yes, but "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

Union Star by Dorry Emmer

Southern partisans argued the North was growing fat at Southern expense

with federal tariffs on manufactured imports. Free trade was the cry.

Webster's motto sets up a dichotomy, a conflict of interest seen in any partnership from marriage to politics. Without compromise the partnership cannot work.

Union Star by Becky Brown

The concept that states could nullify federal laws concerning taxes, tariffs, commerce and slavery was the basis for the next 30 years of debate with South Carolina's John Calhoun chief spokesperson for the Southern notion. President Andrew Jackson's 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina stated, "Disunion by armed force is treason," words underpinning Abraham Lincoln's response to South Carolina's rejection of the 1860 presidential election.

John C. Calhoun (1782- 1850)

Webster and Calhoun represented sectional notions of how the states viewed the Constitution and their political association. 

Yankee notions about Calhoun's slippery slope towards disunion in the 1830s

Debates in the years before the Civil War centered on Yankee notions of Liberty and Union versus Southern ideas—sectional concepts of how the states viewed the Constitution and their political association. Union versus "State's Rights"--- a conflict of ideas ending in a Civil War.

The Block

Denniele's 18" version

The pattern was published several times in the

decades around 1900.

One could buy a pattern from the Ladies's Art Company

or a finished block (50 cents) in the early 20th century.

That gray was probably once blue.

We're doing Carrie Hall's version with a pentagram and 5 points.

Union Star by Carrie Hall

https://spencerartapps.ku.edu/collection-search#/Object/8038

Use the templates.

You could applique it too.

This Month's Tangible Yankee Notion

Sewing Clamps

Last month we looked at manufactured pincushions. One popular Yankee Notion was a variation, a multipurpose tool with a clamp, a pincushion and perhaps an emery cushion to keep needles sharp.

The clamp was the seamstress's third hand. Once screwed to a table top the clamp held the garment as she hemmed it.

A popular variation was a "sewing bird."

The clamp was shaped like ....

The National Museum of American History, which has over 500 clamps in its textile collection (Not fair, I only have one) tells us that an early patent for a sewing bird went to New Englander Charles Waterman , who in 1853 described:

"a 'feathered bird upon the wing, bearing a burden upon its back.' The burden is an emery ball."

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_639795

Sewing dog?

Elizabeth Lyle Moffitt, Kewanee, Illinois, 

Smoky Hill Museum, Salina, Kansas

"The Constitution & Union Forever"

http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2018/07/elizabeth-moffitt-lyles-union-quilt.html

And see another Union quilt here:
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2019/12/constitution-union-quilt.html

Digital sketch

A few of Denniele's 18" blocks

Dorry's Union Star with Yankee Notions

Eight Blocks Done!

75%

Update: Overly optimistic and math ignorant

66%

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson's Civil War

109"

A pair of large mid-19th-century quilts was sold at Freeman's Auctions in 2014

One a star with a circle pieced or appliqued to the center---an interesting use 

of calicoes in the star points and chintzes in the circles.

Turkey reds and Prussian blues with chintz

indicate a date in the 1840s or '50s.

The border: a Turkey red stripe in the form of a Greek Key.

Similar stripe border

The red stripe might also be called a Pompeian design. 

Owen Jones's 1856 Grammar of Ornament showed many red and gold

stripes in the the style of friezes found in the ruins of Pompeii.

1799 Fashion 

Pompeian geometric stripes were quite the fashion everywhere for clothing & interiors.

Quiltmakers in Maryland in the 1840-1860 period were fond of them...

as in this undated chintz album from the Maryland Historical Society

signed by members of the Montell & Blair families. We might guess

it to be from about 1845-1855.

So it's no surprise to find that the pair of quilts are associated with a Maryland family, having descended "in the Nicholson/Lloyd family of Maryland. The Nicholson family lived in Baltimore and Chestertown, the Lloyd family, the Eastern Shore, by descent from Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson (Post) Shippen (1842-1926.)"

128" x 121"

The second is a medallion featuring a hawk of cut-out-chintz

that was also popular with quiltmakers along the Atlantic coast from about 1800-1850.

Border here is cut from the same hawk fabric.

The implication in the auction provenance (ownership history) is that Rebecca Nicholson Post Shippen was the maker.

Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson (Post) Shippen (1842-1926) 

Collection of the Maryland Historical Society.

Rebecca is about 20 here in 1862 or so, just the age to be making quilts---

but not the kind of quilts in the sale.

This quilt seems more like something one would make in 1820 or 1830,

too old-fashioned to be patchwork Rebecca and her friends would have stitched.

So what was Rebecca Nicholson stitching in the early days of the Civil War when she was 20?

Rebecca's sewing group The Brown Veil Club of Baltimore

 about 1862. She is standing on the right.

The young women, like many of their peers, sewed shirts for soldiers. In divided Baltimore the Brown Veil Club, also known as the Monument Street Girls, supplied Confederate men. Rebecca who lived at 209 West Monument Street must have been a fiery supporter of the South; she was friends with the notorious Cary girls, Hetty, Jenny & Constance, who actually had to leave town and move to Virginia they were so indiscreet in a Union state.

Hetty Cary Pegram Martin (1836-1892 )

When the war began the Cary sisters Jenny & Hetty

 lived at the corner of Eutaw & Biddle,

where Maryland General Hospital is now located.

Hetty was also a member of the Monument Street Girls, who organized a Glee Club and found a fiery Confederate song as a theme. The song was described in a 2000 article by Dan Fesperman in the Baltimore Sun:

"James Ryder Randall... penned a nine-stanza rant about oppression beneath 'the despot's heel' [Despot = Lincoln], which was published in Baltimore papers. Jenny set the poem to the tune of an old college song, Lauriger Horatius (O, Tannenbaum), and the girls sang it for their friends. It was called Maryland, My Maryland, a rallying cry for the Confederacy, and in 1939 it become the state song, inflammatory lyrics and all."

The Monument Street Girls apparently sang it as they marched to the Washington Monument in their West Monument Street neighborhood after the Southern victory at the Battle of Manassas in July, 1861.

Rebecca also had a hand in the song's genesis. In her 1904 account of the club's activities she 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. Her father James M. Nicholson was opposed to Secession (although a Southern sympathizer) so she guessed she could get away with treason, reportedly saying: "My father is a Union man, and if I am put in prison, he will take me out."

The publishers Miller & Beachem were imprisoned for their Confederate activities

but Rebecca was not. Her copy of the published song with her notes

is in the Library of Congress.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ihas.200002454.0/?sp=1

Unlike her Cary friends Rebecca toned down her rhetoric and treasonous activities and remained in Baltimore for the rest of the war. 

John Eager Howard Post (1840 -1876)

In April, 1866, a year after the war ended she married this dashing 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 St., 

mourned by his fellow Confederate veterans

Rebecca's Confederate enthusiasms must have faded as her second husband was a Union veteran, Dr. 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.

She lived well into the 20th century, dying in 1926. The Maryland Historical Society has her papers and albums, telling us they "traveled throughout Europe, and eventually settled in Florence, Italy," although they returned to Baltimore. 

Rebecca seems to have enjoyed writing and in her later years published several articles on her own history, her family's and her peers. She was a founding member of the Maryland Society of Colonial Dames in 1891.

Mount Clare Museum House

Maryland Society of Colonial Dames

Rebecca's great uncle was Francis Scott Key who wrote the Star Spangled Banner and she wrote a bit about that as well as her role in publishing Maryland, My Maryland and putting a tune to the poem. Rebecca owned the purported first manuscript of the Star Spangled Banner, scratched on an envelope, which she sold to a collector in 1907.

She and the newspapers made much of the coincidence that she published the Civil-War-era song and her grandmother---another Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson---had a hand in publishing the Star Spangled Banner.

Seeing that her grandmother had the same name makes one wonder if the family history associated the pair of quilts with the wrong generation.

Rebecca Lloyd (1771-1847) who married Joseph Hopper Nicholson

The first Rebecca's granddaughter & namesake loaned this miniature by Richard Cosway (1742-1821) to Alice Morse Earle for her 1903 book Two Centuries of Costume in America.

One might guess that the first Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson stitched the two quilts above as style is much more in keeping with her life span. And then there is the generation in between: Arinthea Darby Parker Nicholson, mother to the younger Rebecca and daughter-in-law to the older. Arinthea married in 1838 and had three daughters.

We'll never know the quilts' maker or figure out that Lloyd & Nicholson genealogy, but it's all been a good excuse to look at the life of an interesting young woman during the Civil War.

Some links:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8970152/rebecca-nicholson

The quilt auction
https://auctions.freemansauction.com/auction-lot-detail/Two-large-pieced-cotton-quilts%2C-first-half-19th-century%2C-The/1489+++++225+/++903614

Article on Hetty Cary in the Baltimore Sun

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2000-10-25-0010250075-story.html

The photo of the Monument Street Girls:
https://www.mdhs.org/digitalimage/brown-veil-club-also-known-monument-street-girls?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=0ad0d954be9d947975dec2a4ded56ab94b76e473-1591739092-0-AQUxO69yLbOySp2IAhjkoTmTCf7MQoruDlZdRLmxL1hXcCkKA6sSw4KnQq_UvDahppT3jJL9FU-Rhobdj6ZuPNiHe-m9YEUrIAKmailxTpgiCmDWwoou_giVxA4ZwhUs0cxrQ6EnklSpNL-PkbBjIG3W7NNBz5jFZcUGpYbiJA3I-FRGnR0PluKKsRRz04hFHB-4nEjH8EaAmZGbwZ3dIV1eG71vryDRDexNL8bJm3HUnZGozevHhdN9F7hly74fR5nG-IAy4nHbj1-jIR0Tq9e43z2W9_A0Iapri_owS256CaZkYP8bBSeONA27JlT2Du8ZnHHbg2qGVPmxj4r50LDvLAVKP8iT9EmVXm1SJl29

Rebecca's first husband's obituary 1876

Second husband's obituary 1895

Liberty Stars By Readers

A virtual quilt.

16 Liberty Stars from our Facebook Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/543662069820849/media/photos

The Civil War Uniform Question

Fence Rail wool quilt attributed to 

Louisa Thomas Bunten (1851-1934)

Crawford, Lewis County, West Virginia

Photo from the Quilt Index & the West Virginia project

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=50-8A-611

According to the family history:

"This comfort was made by Louisa Thomas Bunten, wife of Lieut. Watson Morgan Bunten, Company 1, 40th Regiment, Illinois volunteers, United States Army. The Buntens were married in 1870. Lieut Bunten had been wounded in the Battles of Pittsburg Landing and Missionary Ridge and had been discharged from the army on March 3, 1864. The comfort was made by Louisa Thomas Bunten and friends about 1875 from Lieut. Bunten's Civil War uniforms."

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5180276/louisa-bunten

Like many families, the Buntens passed down a story that their wool quilt was a souvenir of the Civil War, stitched from uniforms. A similar story accompanied the fan quilt below to a documentation  day at the Indiana Project.

Elizabeth Trogdon, Paris, Illinois

Family thought it might have been made 1865-1885

but fan designs of heavy wools tend to have been a fad after 1890 or so.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=68-104-12FE

Log cabin with family story that it was stitched in 1865

from blue and gray uniforms of sons who fought on both sides.

Illinois State Museum. 

CORRECTION: Textile historian Lynne Bassett writes that she and Smithsonian textile curator Madelyn Shaw examined the log cabin above quite closely before they included it on their exhibition on Civil War quilts.  "The fabrics in the quilts ARE consistent with those used in Civil War uniforms."

Typical short Confederate jacket of butternut dyed wools

Eleven years ago I did a post on the topic. 

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/11/civil-war-uniforms-or-not.html

I haven't changed my mind although we continue to see purported Civil War uniform quilts.
CORRECTION & ADDITION: What we need to do is find quilts with actual wools and combination fabrics that are consistent with the family history.

Another log cabin with some beautiful blue wools

and a Civil War uniform story

The topic came up again in our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook group. Lynn Lancaster Gorges with husband Will Gorges runs Battleground Antiques in New Bern, North Carolina. She wrote about the mythical uniform quilt:

"Will and I have never seen one in our many years of specializing in CW uniforms."

The Gorgeses are experts. I'm sticking with them.  CORRECTION: But maybe I am too skeptical.

Here's their shop: https://civilwarshop.com/

That combination of blue and gray seems to trigger

some very imaginative tales.