Confederados #2: Double Cross for Ann & Matthew Maury

 

Confederados #2: Double Cross for the Maurys

by Elsie Ridgley

Ann Hull Herndon-Maury (1811-1901) & 

Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) Composite Portrait

Matthew Maury, a well-respected oceanographer and astronomer, became a Confederate Navy captain who spent much of the Civil War in England negotiating with British ship builders for purchases.

Matthew's 1855 book was the first on marine science

Double Cross by jeanie Arnieri

Daughter Betty in her twenties kept a diary in the first years of the war in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Was Papa’s English appointment a good use of an experienced seaman and scientist or a plot by Jefferson Davis and Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory---a double cross--- to keep him an ocean away so he would not be meddling in the Navy's management?                        

Library of Congress

After Southern defeat Confederate officers feared returning home due to threats of imprisonment or execution. President Andrew Johnson had issued amnesty proclamations but high-ranking officers like Maury were excluded from pardons. 

Ex-President Jefferson Davis spent two years in a military prison.

Unable to return to the States Maury left wife and younger children in England (they had eight in all) and sailed for Maximilian’s Mexico where the Emperor appointed him "Imperial Commissioner of Colonization.” The plan was to develop emigrant colonies in the countryside with US emigrants given land grants. It’s estimated 5,000 Southerners, Black and white, left for Mexico from 1865 into the early 1870s.

Slavery had been illegal in Mexico for decades so those who hoped to build a copy of the Southern plantation system before the war were foiled. For many reasons the plan did not attract enough expatriates to make it work.  

January, 1866 feature widely copied describing

Maury's Colonization manifesto as a "Quack Advertisement"

Double Cross by denniele Bohannon

Ann Maury and the children remained in England where Matthew, visiting them in 1866, was notified of Maximilian’s “collapse of imperial support,” just one aspect of the French-backed empire’s instability. Yet Maury’s alternative, a return to Old Virginia, seemed impractical. "Back to what? To poverty and misery..."

However, after President Andrew Johnson attempted to repair the post-war Union with a Christmas pardon for all in December, 1868 the Virginia Military Institute offered Maury a position, assuring him punishment would not be an issue and so he returned. 

 

October 30, 1868. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer opposed the exile’s

return calling him a "toady" and "a dead beat."

Maury died at 67 in February, 1873, at his VMI home in Lexington, Virginia, occasion for mourning in Virginia…

Norfolk Virginian, February 4, 1873

…and Northern regrets about the turn his once promising career had taken.

From an obituary in the Boston Globe, February, 1873

The Block 

Double Cross

Matthew Maury seems to have been double-crossed by the Confederate government

 and by Maximilian after the war.

The block is simple enough with its 2 pattern pieces, a square and a rectangle. Several unnamed variations are in my Encyclopedia and BlockBase. We might call this one Double Cross in memory of all the betrayals we find in Maury’s tale.

Baltimore Belles & Rebels #1: Open Wreath for Hester Wilkins Davis

Open Wreath for Hester Ann Wilkins Davis by Becky Collis

Hester Ann Wilkins Davis (1809-1888) from a Waldo & Jewitt portrait.

On the reverse “1830” has been added. 

When Civil War began Hester was in her early fifties with three teenaged daughters Rebecca, Mary and Esther and one surviving son William about 20. She and husband Allen Bowie Davis (1809-1889) had lost two young boys about 1850 and William died of tuberculosis soon after the war.

Allen Bowie Davis (1809-1889)

Hester was Allen Davis’s second wife. This wealthy Maryland plantation master owned land worth about $45,000 according to the 1850 census. The slave schedule that year lists 27 people but he is said in other sources to have held 60 or 100 or more enslaved people. Davis, knowledgeable about new agricultural methods, was president of the state Agricultural Society and prospered from progressive ideas at their plantation named Greenwood in Montgomery County, Maryland. 

Greenwood with Victorian gingerbread added by the Davises 

Hester’s family had been in city retail business. Father William Wilkins (1768-1832) was partners with his brother in a Baltimore Street store. Mother Achsah Goodwin Wilkins (1775-1854) is known for her chintz coverlet production. She and her workshop produced dozens of exemplary bedcoverings when Hester was a young woman. Stitchers probably included family members with enslaved and free-Black seamstresses. William Rush Dunton photographed many surviving examples for his 1945 book Old Quilts.

 

Hester’s middle daughter Mary Dorsey Davis (1845-1939) once owned this unquilted bedcover, typical of her grandmother’s workshop in distinctive design. The Smithsonian owns another of Mary’s bedcovers, inked in the corner “A.G. Wilkins 1820/M.D. Davis 1890” long after the piece was finished.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_556248

Open Wreath by Denniele Bohannon who is perfecting

her applique stitch on a new machine.

Hester kept a diary in weeks before the War began until the end of 1864 (later volumes may have been lost.) Her opinions were typical of many Marylanders, particularly those who benefitted from slavery. She did not wish Maryland to secede (it never did) but this slaveholder was opposed to abolition, blaming Northern antislavery activists and Lincoln’s administration for war’s onset. “I am no admirer of Lincoln or his cabinet….the present Cabinet are lamentably deficient.” 

Storyteller Lincoln and his cabinet

She wrote her daughters: “I believe the majority [of Baltimoreans] are for the Union but all opposed to war…the most fearful excitement prevails every where.” 

Son William informed sister Rebecca a month after Fort Sumter: “For your benefit I hereby announce myself, henceforth, a straightout ‘Southern Rights’ man….I can no longer support a man whose avowed intention is to subjugate the South.”

Confederate Army recruiting card preserved in an oval frame

echoing William’s description of himself as a “Southern Rights" man

When the conflict began the house had nine enslaved maids and a cook. Hester recorded that their work freed her to devote time to “the supervision of sewing required to keep a large family clad” (counting slaves young and old as part of that family.) Supervising the clothing production was often the purview of the plantation mistress as avoiding fabric waste was a major goal. Another was keeping sharp scissors out of the hands of women with a grudge but Hester from the Wilkins family of chintz applique artists may have had a particular talent as a seamstress.

As war dragged into its third year she recorded a change in the enslaved women’s attitude. “Heavy scowls” replaced  “cheerful countenances” with a “coarse familiarity of manner.” After learning of emancipation every woman, from dairy worker to house servant, walked away. Hester: “We shall feel much less encumbered with[out] so many useless people.” 

1847-1894

Hester’s letters to son William include a harrowing episode when 12-year-old Esther fell into the plantation’s grain mill as the wheel grabbed her dress. She managed to save herself by shredding the dress.

Can we call the Davis family Rebels? Their wartime actions seem quite pragmatic, like that of the majority of Maryland slaveholders. None of Hester’s three daughters married, a common post-war state. Were they as rebellious as brother William?

 The Block

This asymmetrical arrangement for an open wreath with one flower popping in from the lower right or left seems closely tied to Baltimore. Elly Sienkiewicz classified it a "Lyre Wreath." See a post here: https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2017/10/asymmetrical-open-wreath.html

Print out the two pages on 8-1/2" x 11" sheets.

Becky added a secondary shape inside the leaves.

See the introduction to this 2026 series at this post:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/12/2026-applique-bom-baltimore-belles.html

Post your progress on our Facebook group page: BaltimoreBellesQuilt
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1178792650465362

Confederados #1: Rolling Stone for Martha & Isham Harris

Confederados #1:Rolling Stone for Martha & Isham Harris

by Denniele Bohannon

First block in our 2026 pieced BOM series here. 

Check this CivilWarQuilts blog on the

second Wednesday of each month throughout the year.

Martha Mariah Travis Harris (1822-1897)

Virginia-born Martha Mariah Travis was said to have been nicknamed Crockett by her family for the hero of the Alamo, a reference to her boisterous ways. Isham Green Harris, visiting his brother in Martha's hometown of Paris, Tennessee witnessed her wild ride on a runaway horse and decided any girl who could ride that well was the girl for him. They married in 1843 and had several boys between 1844 and 1858 (the last a pair of twins.)

Isham Green Harris 1818-1897

By 1858 Green (as his friends apparently called him) was Governor of the state of Tennessee propelled in his political career by intellect, legal skills, charm and Secessionist sympathies. His views were not held by the majority but he took it upon himself to ally the state with the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. 

Union parade in the capitol Nashville, March, 1862

As Union troops took over the state Union Military Governor Andrew Johnson actually ruled while Harris moved the Secessionist government to Memphis.

William Gannaway Brownlow (1805-1877)

 "Parson" Brownlow

At war's end in 1865 Unionist William G. Brownlow was elected governor. Among his acts: Forbidding the wearing of Confederate uniforms, declaring martial law in counties where African-Americans were in danger and issuing a reward of $5,000 for Harris's capture on charges of treason and theft.

Rolling Stone by Jeanne Arnieri

Wary of Governor Brownlow's threat Harris decided to leave the U.S. Like many other Confederates he headed south. Accompanied by two of his newly freed slaves, one named Ran, he rode through Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila to Mexico's capitol and then east to the colony of Carlota in the state of Veracruz.

Archduke Maximilian of Austria and Mexico (1832-1867)

with Princess Charlotte of Belgium

Mexico at the time was in the throes of its own civil war. A national uprising of Liberals headed by Benito Juarez began in 1858. While the United States was distracted by its own Civil War, France's Napoleon III invaded Mexico and sent the Hapsburgian Archduke Maximilian of Austria to rule as Emperor in 1863.

President Benito Juarez (1806-1872) was Mexico's President 

From 1857 to 1872 despite the French invasion.

France attacked Mexico taking over cities Puebla, Tampico and Mexico City. The puppet Emperor and Empress of Mexico arrived in Vera Cruz in May, 1864. The following year defeated Confederates seeing a new romantic cause in Mexico's imperial war named a colony of exiled secessionists for the Emperor's wife.

Carlota, the Confederate colony, was 

established south of Cordoba.

Martha Harris and, we presume, some of her younger boys joined Isham there. 

Todd Wahlstom in The Southern Exodus to Mexico characterizes 

Carlota as the "focal point of Southern immigration." 

With no respect for the Mexicans from the refugees----

What could go wrong?

Harris's opinions of his refugee neighbors was no higher than his opinion of the Mexicans.

"Mere adventurers, totally unfitted for the duties of the life that lay before us here..."

The Harrises sailed for England in 1867. A summary below

in a favorable 1898 obituary in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

1867 ad in the Memphis paper

Isham Harris regained political power in Tennessee winning several terms in the U.S. Senate from the late 1870s through his 1897 death. Martha had died just a few months earlier.

Memphis Commercial Appeal

January, 1897

Their end-of-the-century home in Paris, Tennessee

Over the year we will look at other Confederado families who settled in Carlota, some on haciendas confiscated first by the Juaristas, then by the Imperialists and then by the original landowners after the short-term colonists left. 

The Block

Vintage Rolling Stone block, about 1910

Before the Wedding Ring with curves that is our standard this version of a 

Wedding Ring was quite popular in the early 20th century. 

The pattern as "Rolling Stone" can symbolize the restlessness of the people profiled here.

Finally remembered to add the pattern!

Links:

The introduction to Confederados:

https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2025/12/confederados-2026-pieced-civil-war.html?

Our Facebook page to show your blocks & ask questions:

ConfederadosQuilt

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1910891729507739

No need to join; it's a public group

Buy a PDF for all the pattern sheets here in my Etsy shop: $12.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/4427754666/confederados-civil-war-themed-bom-quilt?

David Pottinger found this one from the Indiana Amish

Fabrics: Denniele is using blues from various William Morris reproduction lines and a bit of red.

Jeannie is using subdued red, white and blue prints.

Further Reading:

Todd W. Wahlstrom, The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. University of Nebraska Press

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Southern_Exodus_to_Mexico/ba0oDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Andrew Rolle, The Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Lost_Cause/nitwc8BpciMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Andrew+Rolle,+The+Lost+Cause&printsec=frontcover