"Underground Railroad" Quilts

 

 Underground Railroad quilts displayed by 12- year-olds

who learned all about this era of American History in school.

Too bad "the history" is all myth with no basis in fact

based on a spurious book Hidden in Plain View.

Designs featured in the "Quilt Code" like the Drunkard's Path and the 

Sailboat did not yet exist during the years of slavery.

Do read more about coded UGRR quilts and their inventor at this post:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/09/when-pigs-fly-award.html

My education is not in textile history but in psychology, teaching in the Behavioral Psychology departments at two Universities where we followed a basic behavioral principle: "Offer an appropriate behavior as an alternative to a problem behavior." In this case the problem is promoting false history through quilts.

I realize ranting against these quilts has little effect on people who want to stitch Black history but for several years I have offered an alternative path: Sampler quilts that tell an accurate story of slavery and liberation.

Stories focused on real women and reliable documents

I've designed three samplers. The most recent is Freedom's Friends, an applique BOM in 2022.

Freedom's Friends by Nat Palaskas

The history comes from William Still's book about fugitives on their way from slavery to freedom.

William dedicated the book to "The Friends of Freedom,"

the "Heroic Fugitives" and their descendants.

See a post with links to the free patterns here:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2022/05/freedoms-friends-pattern-post-links-in.html

Freedom's Friends by Deanna Street

Wreath of Hearts by Rebecca Schnekenberger

Link to our Facebook group: Freedom'sFriendsQuiltBOM. It's public so you can join or not.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/325851666128986

Freedom's Friends by Elsie Ridgley

I also published a book with a "History of  Quilts & Slavery" for C&T Publishing.

"8 Projects - 20 Blocks - First-Person Accounts"

Amazon preview here:

https://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fabrications-Unraveling-History-Quilts-Slavery/dp/1571203648?asin=1571203648&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Facts & Fabrications is out of print but C&T and Amazon will print you a copy of the book on demand. See this link:

https://ctpub.com/products/facts-fabrications-unraveling-the-history-of-quilts-slavery-print-on-demand-edition?srsltid=AfmBOooRtifJkfQtfSInbYzBV-iV-uHuwez2KAKysNSoOYoTlD0jkRKe

I designed a third alternative quilt, Threads of Memory, a pieced BOM with new star designs for this CivilWarQuilts blog in 2014.

Threads of Memory by Jean Stanclift

Jean and Becky made models of the star sampler in very different style.

Threads of Memory by Becky Brown

I designed new star patterns to recall women's stories of escape and assistance, each star named 

 named for an important place where the UGRR assisted slaves on the road to freedom.

Madison Star by Jelibet

I removed the links to free patterns several years ago when I began selling the pattern in my Etsy shop. But in a small gesture to counter the current regime's war on accurate history I will repost the 12 patterns for Threads of Memory next week.

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/07/threads-of-memory-underground-railroad.html

Threads of Memory by Jo Tokla

Petticoat Press # 10: Job's Troubles for Louisa Cheves McCord

Petticoat Press # 10: Job's Troubles for Louisa Cheves McCord 

by Becky Brown

Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord, 1810-1879

Sculptural portrait by Hiram Powers, 1859

Job's Troubles can represent Louisa Cheves McCord's career as a Southern fire-eater---a voice of the slave-holding South before and after the Civil War. She was afflicted with many troubles. During the war she lost her son, her brother and three nephews. She was widowed when she was 45 years old and her beloved father died of cognitive decline under her devoted care two years later.

Louisa was astounded when Sherman's occupying troops looted her Columbia house after leaving a warning note: “Ladies, I pity you. Leave this town.” 

Warnings were something Louisa had ignored throughout her life.  How could they, she later wrote, "as soldiers [bring] themselves to shell defenseless women and children in their beds." Defenseless Louisa was not. She, in fact, was one of the leading antebellum defenders of the South in her writing as representative not of just Southern womanhood but Southern culture, women's role and conservative economic and political philosophy.

Job's Troubles by Jeanne Arnieri

In 1852 Louisa's countered Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential attack on slavery in Life Among the Lowly (Uncle Tom's Cabin.) Louisa's essay was signed with her initials L.S.M., initials being a common byline.

"Make your laws to interfere with the God-established system of slavery, which our Southern States are beautifully developing to perfection, daily improving the condition of the slave...make your laws, we say, to pervert this God-directed course, and the world has yet to see the horrors which might ensue from it. The natural order of things perverted, ill must follow.....

"Mrs. Stowe has associated much, it would appear, with negroes, mulattoes and abolitionists; possibly, in her exalted dreams for the perfection of the race, she has forgotten the small punctilios of what, in the ordinary parlance of the world, is called decent society."

See her article here: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/reviews/rere113bt.html

The following year in answer to English critic the Duchess of Sutherland's complaints about slavery's cruelty Louisa was again the voice of the South in an article in the Charleston Mercury. "Christian slavery," she wrote, "[mingles] the graces and amenities of the highest Christian civilization."

In 1855 Sally Baxter wrote her friend English novelist William Makepeace Thackery about a visit to Louisa's home where the family was "as much the stronghold of the slavery party as the Adams faction is of the Abolitionists. Mrs. McCord is hotly engaged in the strife and almost all her feeling and intellect seem to be expended on that one topic, and she and her husband warmly espouse the cause in every paper and periodical to which they can get admission."

Job's Troubles by Becky Collis

Louisa published under a variety of pen names in periodicals such as DeBow's Review, The Southern Literary Gazette, the Southern Literary Messenger and The Southern Quarterly. Many readers recognized her anonymous articles and poetry by her style. No one has compiled a bibliography of her pre-War writing because of the anonymity of those bylines. Her manuscripts and papers were burned when fires were set as Sherman invaded Columbia and she burned many herself.

James Everett Kibler, Jr. in "The Illustrious Mrs. McCord: A Profile in 

Courage" described her political ideas: 

"She praised South Carolinians for their principles [in 1849], which she described as 'among the most conservative in the country' because they did not include man’s 'tinkerings' with God’s natural order that resulted in such new programs as 'the follies of socialism and communism.' She wrote, 'God directs and man perverts.' ....She railed at what she called 'the nauseous froth scum of sickly philanthropy.' "

https://columbiametro.com/article/the-illustrious-mrs-mccord/

Job's Troubles by Denniele Bohannon

Once the war she'd been advocating came to pass Louisa was indeed beset by troubles equal to the Biblical Job. During the war she lost five family members and her vision deteriorated. It may have been physical disabilities in her 50s that stopped her newspaper writing. (And the fact that newspapers required paper, ink, lead type etc., items in increasingly short supply in the Confederacy.)

Vicksburg's Daily Citizen printed issues on the reverse

 of wallpaper scraps in summer, 1863.

Louisa devoted her war time in Columbia to care for the wounded and to Confederate charities (and converse with her friend Mary Boykin Chesnut, who was quite in awe of her.) After the Confederate surrender she was restless at home, drifting to Canada and finding some solace in the women's monument societies, erecting the statues glorifying the Rebellion that are now being removed.

Job's Troubles by Elsie Ridgley

The Block

Job's Troubles is a fairly recent name for this classic star.

Just two large templates

Further Reading
A post on Louisa from Cassandra's Circle BOM:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/03/cassandras-circle-3-louisa-cheves.html

 
Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999)

Leigh Fought, Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa McCord, 1810-1879
Preview:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ym_JiBn3-XIC&dq=lottie+reynold+mccord&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Richard C. Lounsbury, Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography Letters.
Preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=O6P9wdZmBbQC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

 

Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Becky Collis

In the introduction to her book praising Kansas's advantages Sara Robinson mentioned the wild fruit.

Paw-paws grow on trees here.

Sara herself was a somewhat wild fruit in her family tree, a family of which she was quite proud.

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Denniele Bohannon and Elsie Ridgley

Always careful to style her name Sara T.D. Robinson, she had been given two middle names. Today we might call her Sara Lawrence Robinson using her maiden name and married name but in her time women tended to drop their maiden names and use their middle initials and married names---when they weren't just Mrs. Charles Robinson.

Her D.A.R. file highlighting her revolutionary maternal grandfather Henry Dwight 

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Barbara Brackman

Sara's name honored Sara Tappan Raboteau Doolittle (1817-1881), good friend to her mother and wife  of her father's law mentor Mark Doolittle (Sara's older brother got Mark Doolittle's full name.) Sara Robinson was the main source for Blackmar's The Life of Charles Robinson, which has this to say about Sara Doolittle and Clarissa Lawrence.

Sara was raised in a circle of antislavery thinkers and activists.

When she was 18 her father Myron Lawrence declared his opposition to the annexation of slave-state Texas.

From The Liberator in 1845

Belchertown, Massachusetts, 1847

A 1960 history of their hometown tells us:

"One of the most famous people of the early town was Myron Lawrence. His home once stood where the Clapp Memorial Library now stands. Mr. Lawrence studied law in the office of Mark Doolittle in Belchertown. At the age of 27, he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court and served in the Senate for many years....His daughter Sarah (sic) Lawrence married Dr. Charles Robinson who became the first governor of the territory of Kansas. The family frowned upon this marriage because they felt Mr. Robinson would never amount to anything."

Myron died soon after Sara's rebellious marriage. Above an obituary that told us of his "great corpulency."

Sara's husband became Kansas's first state governor and she herself amounted to something as shown in a 1908 edition of Who's Who in America.

Both are given coverage in Lamb's 1903 Biographical Dictionary of the United States:

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Susannah Pangelinan

Mandrakes---we call them May Apples and we

don't eat them as they are poisonous.

The Block