Confederados #7: Garden of Eden for the Whitakers & Norrises

 

Confederados #7 Garden of Eden

 Recalling Brazilian Confederado Isabella Norris Whitaker by Elsie Ridgley

Villa Americana, Brazil in São Paulo state

The term Confederado in Brazilian Portuguese refers to Confederate refugees who established colonies in the South American country. As the last American nation to abolish slavery Brazil attracted defeated Southerners who hoped to build a Confederate replica, growing cotton worked by enslaved people. Alabama politician William Hutchinson Norris arrived in 1866 with his family and bought acreage for cotton.

Dom Pedro (1825-1891), Brazil's monarch since he was five, was a strong supporter of the Confederacy and a benefactor to defeated Southerners who sought new homes, selling them land cheap and offering free transportation. Brazil with a government more stable than Mexico’s became a destination for a few thousand Confederados, many of who lived out their lives there and left Brazilian children and great-grandchildren.

Trading in slaves, Rio de Janeiro

"Many persons who, from long habit and fondly cherished theories, have become strongly attached to the institution of African slavery, fancy that in Brazil they will find an opportunity for the permanent use of that system of labor — Brazil and the Spanish possessions being the only two slaveholding communities remaining in the civilized world." New Orleans Daily Picayune, September, 1865

 

Casa de Norris

Mary Black and William Norris had 10 or 11 children. How many accompanied them from Alabama to Brazil to live in this house? Seven are buried in Brazil; three boys in the U.S.

1850 Census Alabama, Before the War

Isabella P. Norris was the oldest girl, in her mid-20s when they sailed for South America. She soon married another Confederado Joseph E. Whitaker, formerly of the Mississippi Infantry.

Lt. Joseph Elisha Whitaker (1836-1918) & Isabella P. Norris Whitaker (1841-1897)

Few of the transplanted Southerners actually owned slaves but William Norris made those archaic and cruel economics a point of pride. 

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, over two decades after the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation. Most Brazilian/Confederate colonies failed. Norris’s Americana was an exception.

Twentieth-century Norris family members in Brazil

Steagall family members who married into the Norris family

The Block

Garden of Eden by Jeannie Arnieri

The Chicago Tribune’s Nancy Cabot quilt column published the pattern in the 1930s.

Nancy making up history 

1937 in the Chicago Tribune

Garden of Eden by Denniele Bohannon

Read More:

For more information about the colony of Americana, Brazil, see the Auburn University Libraries, which has a Confederados Digital Collection: 

https://content.lib.auburn.edu/digital/collection/confederado/search

Gaston, James McFadden, Hunting a home in Brazil: The agricultural resources and other characteristics of the country. Also, the manners and customs of the inhabitants (1867). 

William Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan's Confederate Colony in Brazil, Austin: University of Texas, 1987. (The failed Iguape Colony)

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/101273703/isabella-whitaker

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #6: Pineapples & Plenty For Amelia Kayser Stein

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #6: Pineapples & Plenty For Amelia Kayser Stein By Becky Collis

Amelia Kayser (Keyser), called Millie, was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1843, daughter of Betty Preiss and Moses Keyser, German immigrants. The 1850 Baltimore census shows Millie at 7 living on Pratt Street with a brother and three sisters (Betty had nine children.)  

Moses was a fairly prosperous merchant, a typical occupation for this immigrant generation of Jews and their children. His dry goods store was at 72 Hanover Street. 

Chaos began when Confederate sympathizers in Union Baltimore rebelled five days after Fort Sumter as the Union's Sixth Massachusetts Infantry marched through their city. ”Sesech” partisans threw stones and other missiles prompting Union soldiers to shoot into the crowd. The Pratt Street Riot left soldiers, mob members and bystanders dead.

17-year-old Luther Ladd from Lowell, Massachusetts was struck by a piece of iron, shot and killed, “The first victim of the war,” declared Harper’s Weekly. 

Account of the insurrection April 20, 1861 Baltimore Exchange

Eighteen-year-old Millie who witnessed the Pratt Street insurrection from her nearby home later told daughter Gertrude "stories of Baltimore and the Northern soldiers being stoned”

Millie married Daniel Stein (1832-1891) in March 1864, becoming part of the large Stein family. It may be that her sister-in-law Rosa Rosenstock Stein was step-daughter to Sarah G. Rosenstock (1835-1907) who has left us a quilt done in classic Baltimore Album style. 

Charleston Museum Donated by Mrs. Luke Vincent Rockwood Attributed to Sarah G. Rosenstock, dated 1857  https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=53-155-30

Baltimore's Jewish community developed their own style of  appliqued albums, not so much friendship quilts, but perhaps block sets bought from a seamstress or two.

The Steins tended towards argumentativeness. Daniel was irascible all his life according to his two youngest children. When the war began most Steins expressed a Baltimorean loyalty to the Confederacy but Daniel and younger brother Solomon were Union partisans. His son characterized Daniel as "Northern in sentiment, though all the rest of the family were Southern… exceedingly disputatious." 

Gertrude & Millie Stein about 1875 

Daniel and Solomon resolved family arguments by leaving Baltimore for Pittsburgh. Ten years later Daniel took the family to Europe, returning in 1880 to settle on ten acres in Oakland, California.

Amelia & Daniel with children about 1876, Gertrude (1874-1946) the youngest

Millie died at 45 of cancer in 1888 when Gertrude was 14, leaving two girls and three boys to be raised by an unstable father who became "more of a bother than he had been," according to Gertrude. He died three years after his wife. His children were not unhappy to be on their own. The Steins had plenty of everything but family harmony.

Pineapples & Plenty by Denniele Bohannon

Detail Denniele's machine applique.

The Block

Detail of Sarah Rosenstock's quilt, Charleston Museum

Two pineapple blocks in an 1847 BAQ attributed to Mary Ann Grooms in a Bonham/Skinner auction

Detail of Becky Collis's

For more on the Steins and the Rosenstocks see this post:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2023/07/amelia-kayser-steins-civil-war.html

Read more about Millie's children, the exceptional Steins:

Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother. Gertrude and Leo Stein.

Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family 

Learn about the Jewish applique quilts of Baltimore in Ronda McAllen's AQSG paper:

http://selftaughtgenius.org/sites/stg/images/3506/McAllen_Ronda_Album_Quilts.pdf

Millie Stein's grave:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/127714469/amelia-stein

Confederados #6: Grandmother's Choice for the Bullochs & Roosevelts

 

Confederados #6: Grandmother's Choice for the 

Bullochs & Roosevelts by Denniele Bohannon

James Dunwoody Bulloch (1823-1901) Confederate Special 

Agent who lived and died in English exile

His mother Martha "Patsy" Stewart Elliott Bulloch (1799–1864)

The Bulloch/Roosevelt family of Georgia and New York personify the cliché of families divided by Civil War. Children and step-children of Martha Elliott Bulloch lived with each other and conflicting loyalties. Martha, Georgia-born and bred, spent the war in Union Philadelphia and New York City.

Bulloch Hall about 1940, a century after its completion

Martha’s home was Bulloch Hall in Georgia but the widow economized by renting it out while she lived with her daughters and their Yankee husbands ---perhaps not Grandmother’s Choice but a financial  necessity. She spent her last years with daughter Mittie and family in New York.

“Mittie” Bulloch (1835-1884), Martha’s daughter & husband Theodore Roosevelt (1831-1878) in the 1870s. Roosevelt did not enlist to fight his in-laws but served the Union cause in administrative roles

Theodore Roosevelt II (1858-1919) 

Mittie’s son future president Teddy Roosevelt grew up in an elegant New York City home where his grandmama and mother were Southrons, displaying their loyalties with small gestures such as smuggling necessities to Southern relatives through the Bahamas and pointedly ignoring Unionist dinner guests by dining “upstairs.” Mittie’s pride in her Confederate brother and step brother encouraged stories her son remembered as “about ships, ships, ships and the fighting of ships, until they sank into the depths of my soul." Teddy became Assistant Secretary of the Navy on his climb up the political ladder.

Lincoln’s funeral procession passed by the Roosevelt townhouse in 1865.The future president is supposed to have been watching from a window.

Grandmother's Choice by Elsie Ridgley

Irvine Stephens Bulloch (1842-1898) about the time the war ended

At 19 he enlisted as a Confederate midshipman. 

English residents Commander James D. Bulloch & half-brother Irvine

By June,1861 James was in England commissioning ships while seeking loopholes in England’s professed neutrality act. Martha Elliott Bulloch’s son and step-son spent the war years in England serving as agents of the Confederacy, purchasing, outfitting and manning ships.

Édouard Manet depicted the CSS Alabama's 1864 sinking of the ship 

that had been James’s most successful purchase.

After Confederate collapse many rebels were given the option of returning to the United State and resuming their lives if they signed “The Oath” but the Bulloch brothers’ transgressions seem to have denied them Lincoln’s promised “Malice Towards None.”  Both remained in Liverpool, choosing exile over defeat and dealing profitably in cotton

Sydenham Avenue recently

James lived on Sydenham Avenue in Toxteth, 2 miles south of Liverpool’s city center. Six years after the War the Liverpool census shows him living with his Louisiana-born second wife Harriott Cross Foster (ca.1830-1897), their two English children and three servants. Two boys were at boarding school and the family was mourning Henry who’d recently died.

The ex-patriate Bulloch brothers died at the turn of the century; Irvine died of a stroke in Wales in 1898; James three years later.

Grandmother's Choice by Jeanne Arnieri

The Block

Mrs. Danner who sold quilt patterns in department stores in the 1930s called this basic block Grandmother’s Choice.

Read More:

The Bulloch Belles: Three First Ladies, a Spy, a President's Mother and ...By Walter E. Wilson

James D. Bulloch: Secret Agent and Mastermind of the Confederate Navy By Walter E. Wilson, Gary L. McKay

 In 1883 James D. Bulloch published his memoirs, entitled The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe; or, How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped. 

1898) https://archive.org/details/secretserviceofc5920bull/page/2/mode/2uphttps://books.google.com/books?id=TcAnAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA89&dq=The+Secret+Service+of+the+Confederate+States+in+Europe;&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwihu7OtqZmOAxXVxskDHfpPDfgQ6AF6BAgEEAM#v=onepage&q&f=false

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #5: Eagle of Freedom for Lucy Jackson

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #5 Eagle of Freedom by Becky Collis

Woman on the auction block

In 1838 Maryland estate owner John Ridgley bought pregnant Lucy Jackson in Baltimore. Her son Henry was born soon after she came to live at Ridgley’s Hampton plantation  in Towson, Maryland.

Two Maryland gentlemen, buyer and seller

Auctioneer Samuel Owings Hoffman began as a dry goods merchant, then specialized in auctioneering. People in bondage passed through his auction service, which was quite lucrative. The 1850 census shows him with property worth $70,000. He was also a politician.

Ridgley’s Hampton in 1808

 The house still stands on a 63-acre National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service.

 

1897 photo of a tenant farmer at Hampton with the old stone slave quarters

 

Cut-out chintz quilt in a bedroom in a recent picture

Eagle of Freedom by Denniele Bohannon

Lucy became head housekeeper, a position of importance. She reportedly married a free man and gave birth to another son George in 1842, who died young.

Library of Congress/Hampton, photo by Frances Benjamin Johnson, early 20^th century

Once Civil War began son Henry in his early twenties left Hampton with three other enslaved young men seeking freedom. They might have gone to Baltimore, a good place to vanish as the city had the largest population of free Black people in the country. Lucy herself soon showed her rebel nature, disappearing from Hampton. Recent researchers at Hampton have traced her to Washington City.

Library of Congress Washington City, 1865. Maine Avenue, Capitol top left corner

After the war Lucy hired lawyer William Boyd to write a letter to John Ridgley demanding the return of her personal property, 19 dresses left at the house when she ran away: “6 common dresses, 9 good dresses, 4 silk dresses, furrs and Muff... and other articles of great value.” Ridgley replied those items of clothing were no longer in the house, probably appropriated by her fellow enslaved women after she left. 

The inspiration: Block from a sampler quilt in the 
Art Institute of Chicago collection.

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/109294/album-quilt

 Civil War Poetry

Two sheets this month

Denniele's blocks 1 to 5 in the official set. I doubt she will use that set though.