Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #9 Baltimore Basket

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #9

Baltimore Basket by Denniele Bohannon

 

Jane Claudia Saunders Johnson 1832-1899

Jane Saunders Johnson was living in Baltimore when the Civil War commenced. As a North Carolina native there was no doubt on which side her loyalties would lie. 

General Bradley Tyler Johnson 1829-1903

Her husband attorney Bradley Tyler Johnson soon raised a pro-Confederate militia “The Maryland Line” in his home town of Frederick. Forty years later, a short biography in the magazine The Confederate Veteran, clarion of the Lost Cause, gives an account of Jane’s “manly” rebellion in Union Maryland. 

To outfit his pro-Southern troops she returned to North Carolina and secured supplies, a mission noted at the time and lauded by the Lost Cause press ever after.

Her mission South was conducted during the convention to determine Maryland’s loyalties, a timely  inspiration to those in favor of Secession.

Following Confederate defeat the Johnsons spent the rest of their lives in Baltimore and Virginia as voice and symbols of the old South.

 

Here a Kentucky newspaper disapproved of Johnson’s 1888 speech that the Reconstruction federal government “is controlled by Confederate soldiers.” "Alas! 'tis true."

 

The Block

Baltimore Basket by Becky Collis

Gross Collection/Dolph Briscoe Collection

Julia Ann Pentz, top dated 1847

A typical Baltimore basket recalls the Baltimore rebel gathering supplies.

International Quilt Museum (2005056.0001)

Top dated 1847

Blocks 1 to 9. Three to go.

Confederados #9: Single Chain & Knot John & Mary Burch Breckenridge

Confederados #9: Single Chain & Knot recalling 

John & Mary Burch Breckenridge

by Jeanne Arnieri

John Cabell Breckinridge (1821-1875) & Mary Cyrene 

Burch Breckinridge (1826-1907) in Canadian exile, 1866

Lexington society must have made note of the 1843 marriage of two Kentuckians, attorney John C. Breckinridge and Mary Burch of nearby Georgetown. John soon went off to fight in the Mexican War of the late 1840s, playing that card into a political career.

Library of Congress

At 36 he became the youngest man ever elected to the U.S. Vice-Presidency running with James Buchanan in 1856. Their campaign poster promised state sovereignty---code for a proslavery policy. By then Mary with six children under the age of 12 (one had died as an infant) was busy enough to leave little mark on Washington society.

Western Kentucky University

After four divisive years of a Buchanan/Breckinridge administration Breckinridge ran for President in the election of 1860.

“Dividing the National Map” shows 1860’s four Presidential candidates (L-R: Lincoln, Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell.) Breckinridge is tearing off the Southern states, which he did, but Lincoln won the four-way election. South Carolina reacted by leading the Secession movement soon after.

Although Kentucky remained in the Union Breckinridge fought with the Confederacy, becoming Jefferson Davis’s last Secretary of War before surrender in April, 1865.

Mary Burch Breckinridge & John Cabell Breckinridge, a composite portrait

After the triumphant Union government indicted him for high treason he fled to Florida and with a son and two friends sailed in a rickety boat across the Gulf of Mexico for Cuba. After commandeering a larger boat they arrived in Cardenas, Cuba in June, 1865. He soon fled to Europe accompanied by Charles J. Helm, a Confederate agent in Cuba, 

Single Chain & Knot by Denniele Bohannon

He was next reunited with the family in Ontario, Canada in the fall. They spent the winter in Toronto greeting other Confederate exiles such as the Jefferson  Davis family, James Mason, Jubal Early--- enough, according to Mrs. Breckinridge, "to form quite a pleasant society among ourselves.”

John & Mary standing left with friends in Ontario,

August, 1866. Behind them Niagara Falls and the U.S.

They found a house in the town of Niagara with a view of the United States but soon took the children to France where they remained for two years. John spent his exile traveling in Europe and the Middle East.

Breckinridge in Parisian exile

"Pardons for all"

Pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in his 1868 general amnesty the Breckenridges were free to return to Kentucky. Johnson was impeached for that Christmas Day pardon but the controversy was not enough to actually motivate Congress to remove him from office.

The family rented a Lexington house on Second Street and John found profitable work in railroad building and the law. He never sought political office again, which would have required him to ask for approval with a 2/3 majority from Congress, a humiliating and perhaps futile move.

Mary took up the post-war cause of elite Southern women, creating the durable myth of the Lost Cause with stone and bronze public statuary. 

She was president of Lexington’s Ladies’ Memorial & Monument Association formed in May, 1869 to fund a sculpture of a cross draped with a Confederate flag on a broken staff unveiled in 1875.

1975 feature about Lexington’s Confederate Memorial

About 3,000 Confederate Memorial Associations attracted female volunteers. Above, an outdoor meeting in Macon, Georgia in the late 1870s.

Two years after the cemetery memorial installation a bronze sculpture funded by The John C. Breckinridge Monument Association was placed before the Fayette County Courthouse. John himself had died seven days before the statue’s dedication.

Breckinridge’s Memorial has been moved from its official public site. In 2018, the Mayor and the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council relocated it to the Lexington Cemetery near the family burials.

The sculpture on a new base

Single Chain & Knot by Elsie Ridgley

Mary was living with her daughters in New York at the time of her death.

Owensboro Messenger, October 1907

The Block

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #8 Wreath of Hearts for Harriet King Hyatt

 

Baltimore Belles & Rebels: #8 

Wreath of Hearts by Becky Collis recalling 

Harriet Randolph King Hyatt (1814-1901) 

 

Among the wealthy merchants of Baltimore when Civil War began was Alpheus Alfred Hyatt (1794-1865) who lived in the mansion above named Wansbeck with wife Harriet Randolph King Hyatt (1814-1901). They had three children but only 15-year-old Ida was living at home. Son Alpheus II was enrolled at Harvard and Harriet's stepdaughter was married.

The large house was not empty; eleven residents counting Irish-born servants were listed in the 1860 census. Anne Breman, born in Ireland, was a live-in seamstress.

It appears these Hyatts were not slaveholders, yet Harriett and her son were considered Union rebels in the "Secesh" family. Alpheus II’s biography notes he and mother Harriett were not in accordance with the rest of the Hyatts when he acted upon his conviction that he should join the Union, “although he should thus estrange himself from those who were nearest and dearest to him, for his relatives in Maryland sympathized with the South…It was not until thirty years after that his relatives became reconciled to their Union veteran.”

Alpheus Hyatt II (1838 - 1902)

Alpheus joined the 47th Massachusetts Volunteers where he mustered out at war’s end as a captain and resumed his studies, becoming a well-respected paleontologist at Harvard.

Frank Leslies's Illustrated Newspaper, May 14, 1864

Baltimore’s Union fundraising fair was held for weeks in April and May, 1864. Organizers were Union-sympathizing society women such as Fanny Turnbull, Elizabeth Kell Bradford and Annie M. Gilman Bowen. Harriet among them had charge of several artistic departments such as the Tableaux Vivants ---costumed theatrical scenes in which the actors assumed a static pose.

Tableaux Vivant depicting the doomed Mary Queen of Scots and her ladies

Robert W. Schoeberlein, Baltimore City Archivist, tells us: "Despite the apparent solidarity of the state’s loyal population, the Maryland Fair could only be termed a modest financial success when compared with similar 1864 events. The final tally exceeded just over $83,000. In contrast, both the New York and Philadelphia fairs each cleared over $1,000,000.....While competition for donations from other cities most likely affected Maryland’s net amount, both economic realities and the state’s political division did factor largely."

Perhaps Alpheus Senior was the family member with Confederate loyalties. He died a few weeks before the war was over in New York and was buried in Washington City. Was he estranged from his wife and son? And if a Confederate sympathizer why was he in New York? 

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington by Marion Boyd Allen, 1915

A biography of her famous son notes mother Harriet was “a woman of strong and decided character and an amateur artist of considerable ability, some of her copies of old masters and tapestries being noteworthy.” Her granddaughters inherited that artistic talent. Both Harriet Randolph Hyatt Mayor (1868-1960) and Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) were professional artists with Anna a prominent sculptor of monumental pieces in the 20^th century.

The Block

 Despite rumors of family dissension we are giving the Hyatts a wreath of hearts.

Read More:

Schoeberlein, Robert W. "A Fair to Remember: Maryland Women in Aid of the Union. Maryland Historical Magazine 1995.

civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2020/01/baltimore-marylands-sanitary-fair-union.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/147518940/harriet_randolph-hyatt

Confederados #8: Album for Henry Watkins Allen

 

Confederados #8: Album Recalling Henry Watkins Allen

by Denniele Bohannon

Henry Watkins Allen (1820-1866)

Among the estimated 10,000 Confederate refugees in Mexico was Henry Watkins Allen, Governor of Confederate Louisiana in the last years of the war. Born in Virginia, he grew up in Lexington, Missouri where he may have met some of the other exiles discussed in this series. When the Civil War began he was a widower living in Louisiana, running a sugar plantation. 

People used to think nothing of cutting up historically valuable

textiles as personal souvenirs. A Connecticut Yankee

cut this star from the flag Robert E. Lee carried at

the Appomattox surrender.

After Southern surrender Allen resigned from the Governorship and headed for San Antonio, Texas and then through Eagle Pass south to Mexico City in August, 1865.

The Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square about 1865

His sympathies with Benito Juarez’s revolutionaries are evident in letters to friend Sarah Ann Dorsey of Beauvoir, Mississippi. who later quoted many in her biography Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana.

Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey (1829-1879)

Allen wrote of his introduction to Emperor Maximilian and Carlota and expressed his greatest fear---being imprisoned back home like Jefferson Davis (another of Sarah Dorsey’s protégés.)

Belgian Princess Marie Charlotte Amélie (1840-1927)

 known as Carlota in Mexico, was about 25 when she met Allen.

Allen without money and handicapped by leg wounds suffered at the Battle of Baton Rouge decided to support himself and his causes with an English-language newspaper The Mexican Times. Subsidized by the French, the Times claimed to be devoted to “the best interests of the Mexican Empire,” which Allen viewed as welcoming defeated Confederates.

Business street in Mexico City, mid-19th century

First published in September, 1865, Allen's newspaper promoted Mexico as an agricultural paradise with excellent climate, soil, mineral deposits and transportation to the Atlantic, the Pacific and Texas---if railroads were built. The Times invited “All those who have no employment and little means” and “those who are discontented and cannot be made satisfied with the new order of things.”

Album by Elsie Ridgley

Allen, confined to crutches, was not well. About six months after beginning the newspaper he complained of fevers, leg pain and intestinal troubles. He planned to sail to France for a surgical cure but died in Mexico City on April 22, 1866. John N. Edwards took over the Mexican Times. (See Block 12.)

The Block

 Album by Jeanne Arnieri

Vintage version of #1812 in Turkey red

 

The Ladies Art Company in their pattern catalog called this quilt block "Album" because there was a good spot for one's name in the center. A paper album is a collection gathered or bound as Sarah‘s letters from Henry Allen were.

The block has a lot of small pieces. One could fussy-cut stripes.

Read More

Sarah Ann Dorsey, Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana.    

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433082544754&seq=86